Miller has been a mentor to hundreds of poets through her years as a teacher at University of Arizona. The Boston Book Review compares Jane Miller’s “careening, associative” verse to the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns. All are inventive, energetic, and risky. Miller was originally a painter. She sees the processes of painting and writing as much the same, but she found herself unable to paint and write poetry at the same time, so she abandoned painting in favor of writing. W.S. Merwin calls her work “continuously suggestive, intimate, and beautiful.” Miller was influenced by Frederico García Lorca, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Adrienne Rich
