About the Author

Reentry Shock is produced by award-winning writer, editor and teacher Greg Blake Miller. Two decades of wide-ranging creative work in media, academia and the arts have taken Greg from the “Wild Wild East” of 1990s Russia, where he worked at Mosfilm Studios and The Moscow Times, to the neon roller coaster of 21st-century Las Vegas. He is the author of the short-story collection Decemberlands and the scholarly study Reentry Shock, in addition to hundreds of articles, essays, and stories for magazines and journals. Greg is an assistant professor of narrative media at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the director of Olympian Creative, a coaching firm dedicated to helping creative professionals and community leaders nurture their gifts, confront their challenges, develop their ideas and maximize the power of their projects.

From 2010-2014, Greg edited the innovative city magazine Vegas Seven, helping to build the publication on multiple platforms and lead it to 95 state and regional honors in its first four years. Greg was named Nevada’s Outstanding Journalist in 2011, and in 2014 Seven won the state’s General Excellence Award. Whether working with experienced staffers, talented freelancers or scholars and thinkers from the community, Greg encouraged storytelling, analysis and lyricism. “My general message to writers and creatives has been, ‘Know who you are, and be more of it,’” he says. “Once you’ve mastered your subject, it’s crucial to master your voice, to learn how to use it effectively without losing its uniqueness.”

Over the past decade, Greg has brought the same message to hundreds of students in his writing and communication courses at UNLV and the University of Oregon. “Too often, in both schools and the media business, we train people to be smoothly ordinary,” he says. “Sure, that gives things a professional sheen, but what’s the point in reducing creative people to less than they are? My passion is to help people harness their innate potential to observe, understand, structure and create. I want them to discover their voice and learn how to maximize its power.”

Greg credits his time working with renowned theatrical directors Franco Dragone and Pavel Brun (Le Réve, Celine Dion’s A New Day) for showing him the joys of “breaking the glass, building a better lightbulb, then breaking it again.” A similar education in the art of “breaking stuff and making stuff,” he says, came when he served as story producer for film director Kerry Candaele’s critically acclaimed 2013 documentary Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony, which screened at Lincoln Center and at numerous international film festivals. “The mission in Kerry’s work was to clearly express what was clearly inexpressible—the transformative power of Beethoven’s work,” Greg says. “But he pulled it off with a perfect balance of structure, concrete information and soaring lyricism.” Greg is now working with Candaele on Love & Justice: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Rebel Opera, the second part of Candaele’s Beethoven | Hero trilogy.

Greg holds a doctorate in international communication from the University of Oregon and a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Southern California, where he won the prestigious Moses Fiction Prize. He is also a graduate of the University of Washington’s master’s program in Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies, and has written extensively about Russia and the former Soviet Union, culminating with Reentry Shock (UMI, 2010), the story of how a group of late-Soviet filmmakers challenged the nation’s stifling cultural conventions and helped pave the way for Perestroika. Greg did his undergraduate work at the University of California, Irvine, graduating summa cum laude in history.

Currently, Greg is working on a novel set in the cinematic world of the Soviet 1960s. Wrinkles in the space-time continuum are involved. And a little gray cat.

To learn about upcoming readings, publications and events, visit Greg’s author page on Facebook, Greg Blake Miller Books & Stories. To learn more about Greg’s work at Olympian Creative, please visit OlympianCreative.com and the Olympian Creative Facebook page, where you’ll find storytelling tips, insights on the creative life and information on upcoming training events.