Millar received an MA degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1970. He has worked as a telephone installation foreman and commercial fisherman and in 1997 gave up this blue collar life to try his hand at teaching. He has poems about fatherhood, labor, relationships and the life of the American man in the 20th Century.

His work has appeared in many magazines and journals, includingThe Alaska Quarterly Review, "DoubleTake," Ploughshares, Poetry International, and Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, New Letters, Raleigh Review and Shenandoah.

He has taught at Mount Hood Community College, Oregon State University. He now teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University and the Esalen Institute.

He is married to poet Dorianne Laux; they live in Raleigh, North Carolina.

In 2002, Millar was awarded a Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2008 his work won a Pushcart Prize. He has also been the recipient of grants from the Montalvo Center for the Arts and from Oregon Literary Arts.

His writing includes two books of poetry, Overtime (2001), a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and Fortune (2006). A third collection, Blue Rust," is due out from Carnegie Mellon University Press in fall of 2011. He has also published two chapbooks, "Slow Dancer", Cherry Valley Editions, 1992, "Nightbound", Idaho Review Press, 2009 and a third, "Bestiary," from Red Dragonfly Press to be published in summer of 2010.