Alton Miller's Page

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About Me: I came to Chicago as a ballet manager. Formerly associate producing director of Arena Stage in my native Washington, D.C., and managing director of the Washington Ballet, I was named general director of Maria Tallchief's Chicago City Ballet in 1983. In 1984 I was appointed press secretary to Mayor Harold Washington, a position I held until the mayor's death in 1987. As a communications consultant I worked with then Senate candidate Carol Moseley-Braun, Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode, Chicago City Treasurer Miriam Santos, the Illinois Arts Alliance, the Chicago Board of Education, and for United Auto Workers in its contract dispute with Caterpillar, Inc., in Decatur and Peoria, Illinois. In 2005 I was named associate dean of the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago, where I am also a tenured associate professor of writing and political communications. The author of three nonfiction works, including a memoir, Harold Washington: The Mayor, The Man, I received my M.F.A. in Writing from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. My thesis was a (still unpublished) political novel, "Chicago Power & Light."