Milenko (Miles) Budimir is from Cleveland, Ohio, entering the world at St. Alexis Hospital on Broadway Avenue, just up the hill from the steel mills, a few months after the EPA came into existence. He spent his childhood in the soot-covered streets of Cleveland, wiping coal dust from the front porch of his family’s house off Broadway Avenue, and moved out to the leafy southwest suburbs before junior high school.

He’s the author of two poetry chapbooks; Departures (Burning River) and Rustbelt Romance (deep cleveland), with a new collection of poetry due out in 2024 from Roadside Press. His poems have appeared in a variety of publications including the Edith Chase Symposium anthology Songs for Wild Ohio, Show us Your Papers: An Anthology (Main Street Rag), Gasconade Review, Poetrybay, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and Great Lakes Review, among others. His freelance writing has more recently been in Balkanist and BELT. He works as a philosophy lecturer and a technical writer and editor in the Cleveland area where in his free time he likes to read, play percussion in the band Malphonia, and tend to his vegetable garden.  

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