David Mills teaches poetry and playwriting. He has worked as a writer-in-residence for twenty years in public schools, Yeshivas, prisons, battered women’s shelters, and homeless shelters.

David has a master’s in creative writing from New York University and is a cum laude graduate of Yale University. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Fence, Jubilat, Callaloo, Rattapallax, Aloud Poets from the Nuyorican Café, Harvard University’s Transition Magazine, Obsidian III, Brooklyn Rail and Hanging Loose Press. He is a 2010 Queens Poet Laureate Finalist. His collection The Dream Detective was a small press bestseller. He has won a New York Foundation of the Arts fellowship, as well as fellowships from Breadloaf, Henry James, Brio, PALF (Ghana’s Pan-African Literary Forum), Hughes/Diop, and Soros to travel to Poland to write poems about the Holocaust. He has also recorded his poetry on RCA records with jazz artist Steve Coleman. Working with a jazz band, he opened for Chick Corea and David Sanborn at the Vienna Jazz Festival performing his poetry. He was featured on the PBS documentary “Slammin.” He has written book reviews for the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and Rolling Stone Magazine. David also lived as writer-in-residence in Harlem Renaissance luminary Langston Hughes’ landmark Harlem home.

David’s poems have been displayed at the Venice Biennale and the German documenta art exhibition. He was an audition writer for Sesame Street. Playwriting commissions include a Julliard School of Drama production, an Urban Stages play about the life of Frederick Douglas, and an Italian dance theater piece—_The Tarantella_.