Google has honoured Dorothy Miles with a Doodle in celebration of her career as a poet and deaf community activist.
The cartoon of the Welsh poet at work is displayed on the homepage of the search engine for users in selected countries on August 19.
Several times a year, Google honours the great and the good with its Doodle, which frequently highlights unsung heroes and heroines.
August 19 is significant as it is the date she was born in 1931.
Youmee Lee, a deaf Korean American guest artist, illustrated the Doodle, revealing Miles’s poetry “deeply resonates”.
“I discovered Dorothy “Dot” Miles’s work when I explored deaf literature a while ago,” she said. “Her poetry deeply resonates. I related to her immediately because, like her, I am an ambitious deaf woman artist with a love of storytelling.
“We expressed our deaf experiences in artistic forms. I created an animated film shaped by American Sign Language (ASL) poetry, which led me to connect with many deaf poets who Dorothy Miles’s work has inspired.”
Who was Dorothy Miles?
Miles was a Welsh poet and activist in the deaf community, who was born in Holywell, Flintshire.
The Welsh-born wrote poems in American Sign Language, British Sign Language, and English throughout her life. Her writings established the groundwork for contemporary sign language poetry in the UK and the US. She is recognised as the founder of BSL poetry, and many deaf poets of today were influenced by her work.
She became deaf due to cerebrospinal meningitis in 1939.
At the age of 25, she travelled to the United States in 1957 to enrol at Gallaudet College, which was partially funded by an association for the deaf and hard of hearing.
She married a fellow student, Robert Thomas Miles, in September 1958 but they separated a year later.
After finishing her education, Miles lived as an expatriate in the United States, and started her teaching career in the public schools of New York City, noticing that a lot of children faced difficulties since they didn't have access to good learning resources.
She established the Children’s Book Council in 1964, a non-profit organisation that gives books and other resources to underprivileged children.
In 1967, she joined the National Theatre of the Deaf. After that, she went back to the UK, where she rose to prominence in the British deaf community.
Miles then established and taught at the British Sign Language tutor training course: the first university course designed to train deaf people to become BSL tutors.
In addition, she penned the best-selling BBC book BSL – A Beginner's Guide, which was released in tandem with the TV show, and was later involved with the See Hear TV series.
However, Miles was dealing with manic depression (now known as bipolar disorder) during the early 1990s and committed suicide in 1993 by jumping out of a second-story window at the age of 61.
In honour of Miles, a group of friends formed the Dorothy Miles Cultural Centre.
