Jack Miles

A MacArthur Fellow (2002-2007) and Senior Advisor to the President at the J. Paul Getty Trust, Jack Miles is a writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and many other publications. His book GOD: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 and has been translated into sixteen languages, including Hebrew and (twice) Chinese. A sequel to that book entitled CHRIST: A Crisis in the Life of God was published simultaneously in 2001 in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France. Dutch, Italian, Japanese, and Brazilian translations are in progress or in print.

Over a period of nearly twenty years, 1975-1995, Miles was successively an editor at Doubleday, executive editor at the University of California Press, literary editor at the Los Angeles Times, and finally a member of the Times Editorial Board, writing on politics and culture. He is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy and serves on the final fellowship selection committee of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Miles has been Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities at Caltech, Director of the Humanities Center at the Claremont Graduate University, Regents Lecturer at the University of California, and Visiting Fellow with the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science, University of Chicago.

Born in Chicago in 1942, he spent the years 1960-1970 as a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, 1964-1966, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 1966-1967, before enrolling at Harvard University where he completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages in 1971. He is fluent in several modern languages.

Miles served as a member of the nonfiction jury for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. In 1996, he chaired the jury for the Irish Times International Fiction award. He was the founding director and for seven years the jury chair of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards at the Claremont Graduate University. Miles is a past president of the National Book Critics Circle, and an advisory board member of PEN Center USA West.

Since 1986, Miles has made his home in Southern California with his wife, Jacqueline, a clinical psychologist, and their daughter, Kathleen.