Miriam Vermilya was a retired grade school teacher and a well known painter and writer in Greenville, Ohio. The day before she died unexpectedly in January of 1999, she met with the Greenville Poets to assemble her poems into the manuscript, Heartwood, that won the Walt McDonald First Book Awards from Texas Tech University Press. This volume was later nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and was also a Finalist for the 2000 Foreword Book of the Year Award in Poetry. Vermilya's poems sum up her reflections on life, love, marriage; the deaths of friends and family, and most poignantly, on her own aging and death.

Miriam Vermilya: A Brief History