Authors in Training

Cassandra Miah Bio

Cassandra Miah is a native New Yorker sexagenarian raised in Harlem and last educated at Fordham University in Forensic Social Work. She is a two time World Trade center survivor and she was trained and worked as a Verizon Customer Service Associate retiring after thirty odd years. She founded the Safety and Wellness Committee used to educate employees and address issues of men and women’s health and safety issues while producing several Wellness exhibits and seminars. She created written job aids utilizing her writing skills. Ms. Miah also worked as an advocate of CWA Local 1105 as a shop steward, negotiating and resolving employee issues for nearly twenty years. In 1999, her love of the written word allowed her to be a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show to discuss The Reader by Bernard Schlink. At the age of sixty-one Cassandra is presently homeless and lives in a homeless facility with two hundred other outstanding women. This is her first experience speaking truth to power on a national platform on homelessness.

Why I Write

By Cassandra Miah

As a teenage girl in the sixties, during the civil rights movements I began reading works by Martin Luther King Jr., Eldridge Cleaver and other revolutionaries. I watched as history unfolded across a small screen watching water hose and police dog justice meted on my people making me both sad and angry. I attempted to understand what was unfolding. I asked my uncle Eddie what this was and why, his response as always was to look it up—research baby. But in that era there was no internet or speedy archives just dribs and drabs of some things if the larger culture deemed it worthy. This period of my life merged with the awful teenage years where everything touched you deeply, too deeply. And lacking life experience, I didn’t know how to respond to the chaos; I began writing poetry. It was revolutionary writing; I believed that I could force the powers that be to change—so naïve. That is when I wrote the reason I continued was higher education, papers, essays and reports and I got high praise from most and anger from some. But I continued because my mother saw something in everything I wrote and it touched me. I write now because I have to speak truth to power and they seem to take it better in words; seems more acceptable. I write now to heal and soothe my soul. I write now to persuade and reflect and most importantly I write because I can.

Authors in Training

347-968-0295

-Ken Brown

718-943-1340 ext. 233