Sylvia Miles has spent decades helping young people find their way. Now, she’s sharing her story with them, hoping her words reach those who need them most.
Miles, a job coach in the Adult Transition Program (ATP) at Community High School District 218, recently donated about a dozen copies of her debut book, “In the Heart of a Fatherless Child,” to the Learning Resource Centers at Eisenhower, Richards and Shepard high schools. Two additional copies were given to the Delta & Summit Learning Center.
The book, published in June 2025 through Pretty Nerd Publishing and edited by Dr. Ariel Sylvester of DePaul University, is a deeply personal collection of stories and poetry about Miles’ experiences growing up without a father and her desire to inspire healing and change.
“My book is about children that grew up in a fatherless home, where there are disadvantages and negative things that could possibly happen without a father or a male role model to help or to redirect their child’s negative actions and behaviors,” Miles said.
A lifelong advocate for children, Miles said the idea for the book began more than two decades ago while she was working at a Chicago school.
“One day, they had me working in the office, going through cumulative cards to check information,” she said. “I started noticing that the majority of these students had no father listed on their cards. Many of them did not have fathers living in the homes. I thought about my situation, growing up never knowing my father. That’s when I started carrying a folder with paper. When a thought hit me, I would write it down. That was 24 years ago.”
The book took years to complete.
Miles would start and stop, picking up her notes and putting them down again until finally, while in California, she decided to finish what she started. That is when she contacted Sylvester, whom she met at the C2E2 Conference in Chicago, to edit the book and help her bring it to life.
Completing the book was a personal milestone for Miles, and donating copies to CHSD 218 libraries was a natural next step.
“What made me donate to the CHSD was knowing that some of the students who attend the schools in this district are underprivileged and living in fatherless homes,” she said. “It is not just the African American students. It is a widespread issue in all nationalities and communities. I donated about 10 or 11 books in all. Three went to each of the high schools, and two went to Delta & Summit Learning Center.”
Miles, who currently lives in Park Forest, attended Moraine Valley Community College, where she studied early childhood education, and Olivet Nazarene University, where she pursued business administration. Beyond her role as a job coach, she is an emerging author, a lifelong Chicagoan and a proud mother and grandmother who has spent decades nurturing and empowering children and young adults.
With more than 1,100 poems to her name, Miles writes from lived experience, often drawing from her own challenges and triumphs. Her book, she said, is both a mirror and a guide — a mirror for children to see they are not alone and a guide for fathers to understand just how deeply their presence matters.
“My hope is to reach an audience of young people who grew up without a father figure, offering a sense of direction and a potential blueprint of life that they may have been missing,” Miles said. “For fathers who have lost their way, this book can be a catalyst for change, a wake-up call or a source of inspiration to reclaim their role as a leader and a positive force in their families’ lives by offering them a path back to their purpose.”
Miles dreams of her message reaching far beyond CHSD 218, even imagining her book making its way into prisons to inspire incarcerated fathers to reconnect with their children.
“I really want this book to reach the right hands of an influential person in the hope that it reaches many fathers across this nation,” she said. “I wish that I could send thousands of copies to every father in the prison system across the globe. They are my ultimate target.”
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