Davis Miller

Davis Miller is the author of a trilogy of literary memoir, including the number-one international bestseller The Tao of Muhammad Ali: a fathers and sons memoir (Random House/Vintage U.K., 1997), the number-three international bestseller The Tao of Bruce Lee: my martial arts memoir (Random House/Vintage U.K., 2001) and, most recently, Approaching Ali: A Reclamation in Three Acts (W. W. Norton/Liveright, 2016). He is also the author of the short story collection The Zen of Muhammad Ali: And Other Obsessions (Random House/Vintage U.K., 2003).

In 1999, David Halberstam and Glenn Stout judged Miller’s story “My Dinner with Ali” one of the twenty best American literary sports stories of the twentieth century. In addition, the Sunday Magazine Editors Association judged “My Dinner with Ali” the best essay published in an American newspaper magazine in 1990. The Miami Herald nominated Miller’s personal essay "The Zen of Muhammad Ali" for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing (an unusual honor for a freelance story). In 2010, Cool News named “My Dinner with Ali” one of the world’s best-ever magazine stories.

Miller’s fiction and non-fiction have been published in Esquire (U.K.), GQ (U.K.), Men's Journal, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, and Sport Magazine (from 1989 to 1997, Miller was Sport’s Contributing Editor-at-Large), as well as in numerous additional national and international magazines, and also in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Hartford Courant, the Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Louisville Courier-Journal, (New York) Newsday, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Houston Chronicle, the Seattle Times, the Guardian (U.K.), the Independent (U.K.), the Observer (U.K.), and the Telegraph (U.K.), among many others. He has written a documentary feature film for Warner Brothers, two longform documentary radio programs for BBC 4, and he has been a commentator for NPR's All Things Considered.

Miller's transformed-by-Muhammad-Ali tales have been developed into a chamber opera by composer D. J. Sparr for the Washington National Opera; in June 2013 the opera received its world premiere in critically acclaimed sold-out performances at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Along with Pulitzer Prize-winning librettist Mark Campbell, Miller is co-librettist of that work. As of 2025, the opera has been produced by opera companies in various U.S. cities, including Raleigh (North Carolina Opera), Las Vegas (Opera Las Vegas), Baton Rouge (Opera Louisiane) and Asheville (Asheville Lyric Opera).

In addition, The Tao of Muhammad Ali has been developed into an immersive podcast series by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment & Television. Miller hosts that series, which premiered on iHeartMedia in 2024.

Along with his writing and producing partner, Derek Jennings, Miller is presently developing The Tao of Muhammad Ali into an anthology streaming television series. Miller lives near Asheville, North Carolina, which, ever since the turn of the 20th Century, has been nicknamed the Paris of the American South.