By Laura Ziegler
Kansas City, MO – Joe Miller started out to do a story about the Central High School debate team as a way to talk about problems with Kansas City Missouri schools. Central had just gotten failing marks as an academically deficient school. Miller believed he could try and tell the bigger story of why yet another urban school was struggling by focusing on the debaters. But in his first book Cross-X, recently released by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Miller ended up telling a very different story. In an interview with KCUR's Laura Ziegler, he explains how his first encounter with the debate team at Central High surprised him.
Joe Miller reads from his book Cross-X: A Turbulent, Triumphant Season with an Inner-City Debate Squad on Wednesday at the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, and, in Kansas City, at Unity Temple on November 7 at a reading sponsored by Rainy Day Books.