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The Public Square with Michelle Miller on "Belonging"

Women's History Month Author Talk

The DC Public Library is excited to host a premiere Author Talk with Michelle Miller on her newly released title Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love.

Belonging is Emmy Award-winning journalist and CBS Saturday Morning co-host Michelle Miller’s candid memoir of her search for the light-skinned Chicana mother who deserted her at birth and her subsequent struggle to make sense of who she was and was meant to be. This lifelong quest would lead her down a personal rabbit hole, but also shape her voice as a Black woman in white newsrooms, as she reported history-defining moments like the Rodney King beatings and the murder of George Floyd. 

Michelle will be in conversation with award-winning journalist Keith Alexander. The discussion will be followed by a 10-minute Q&A from the audience and Michelle will sign copies of Belonging.

The DC Public Library is excited to partner with The Washington Association of Black Journalists and the first 50 registered attendees will receive a copy of Belonging provided by The DC Public Library Foundation.

This event will have American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation. For reasonable accommodations, please contact the Center for Accessibility at least seven (7) days in advance at 202-727-2142 or DCPLaccess@dc.gov

About Michelle Miller

A singular story of parental abandonment, racial identity, and five decades of family secrets, BELONGING: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

Michelle Miller is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and CBS Saturday Morning co-host Michelle Miller’s candid memoir of her search for the light skinned Chicana mother who deserted her at birth and her subsequent struggle to make sense of who she was and was meant to be. This lifelong quest would lead her down a personal rabbit hole, but also shape her voice as a Black woman in white newsrooms, as she reported history-defining moments like the Rodney King beatings and the murder of George Floyd. Her complicated family story and her racial identity resonates with the nation’s ongoing, imperfect racial reckoning.

Miller was born in a deeply segregated Los Angeles in 1967, the product of an extramarital affair. Her father was a prominent surgeon who attend to RFK the night of his assassination and Compton’s first Black city councilman, her mother a Latina hospital administrator who presented as white. After her mother left, Miller was raised largely by her father and paternal grandmother. Young Michelle was bused to wealthy white schools as the city tried to integrate, further obscuring her own mixed-race identity. When she was twenty-two, and her father was dying of cancer, he instructed her to “Go and find your mother.” BELONGING chronicles Michelle’s decades-long efforts to connect with the woman who gave her life.

BELONGING “is my witness,” Miller says. “In its simplest terms, it is the story of one woman’s search for herself. In the context of my mother’s early abandonment of me, and my coming of age in the racialized crucible of my American homeland, it is a search that has involved the painful work of constructing an identity that is authentic and purposeful, healed, and whole. Perhaps, as my father suggested when he urged me to explore the unknown, this is the task we must each engage—to find our lives. We are each, after all, born to a quest whose starting point is set by the providence of where our star is cast, and we must place our feet upon the path where we awaken, and follow it home.” 

Michelle Miller is an Emmy, Gracie, DuPont, and Murrow award-winning journalist who co-hosts CBS Saturday Morning. She first joined CBS News in 2004, and her work is also regularly featured on the CBS This Morning, CBS Sunday Morning and CBS Evening News. She has also appeared as a correspondent on 48 Hours.

Poignant and inspiring, BELONGING is the unvarnished, universally appealing story of Michelle Miller’s journey to understanding herself and her own Blackness. 

About Keith Alexander

Alexander began covering crime and social issues in 2006 following more than five years as a financial writer for the Post where he covered the airline and business travel industries. His former travel column, “Business Class” ran weekly in the Financial section from 2001 through 2006.

During his tenure at the Post, Alexander was a lead business writer covering the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the fallout that occurred within the airline industry as a result. For that coverage, Alexander became a finalist for the 2002 Livingston Awards, a national competition for print and broadcast journalists 35 and younger.

In 2007, Alexander was part of the Pulitzer Prize winning reporting and writing team for the Post’s coverage of the Virginia Tech mass shootings. Alexander nabbed the exclusive interview with poet and Virginia Tech professor Nikki Giovanni who taught the gunman in one of her classes before having him removed.

Prior to joining the Post in 2001, Alexander was a business reporter for USA Today covering airlines and business travel. During his tenure at USA Today, Alexander won eight “Best of USA Today” awards. He is also a former correspondent for Business Week magazine and a former business reporter with The Dayton Daily News in Ohio.

He graduated from Howard University in 1991 with a degree in journalism. In 2000, Alexander was named an outstanding alumnus by Howard’s School of Communications. And in 2017, the school awarded him the Paul Robeson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Journalism.

He has been a regular on various TV news segments including NBC “Nightly News” with Brian Williams; A&E’s, “Marcia Clark Investigates the First 48”; TV One’s “Fatal Attraction,” ABC New’ 20/20, “Crime Watch Daily with Chris Hansen, syndicated; “Deadline” with Tamron Hall; TV One’s “Fatal Attraction,” CBS Morning News; MSNBC, NBC’s The Today Show, CBS Morning News, and BET Nightly News with Ed Gordon.

Alexander has also worked as an adjunct journalism professor at various Washington area colleges including Howard University, the University of Maryland and Trinity College of Washington, D.C.

This event is part of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library's 50th anniversary speaker series, The Public Square. The Public Square is held in partnership with the DC Public Library Foundation and Pepco: An Exelon Company.

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