Miles Cigolle grew up in a classic adobe house near Albuquerque's historic Old Town with his parents and three siblings. His mother Terry was a ceramicist and a fine arts painter. His father Edward was a local grocer catering equally to the local Native Americans, Hispanics and Anglos with his two brothers. Miles studied architecture at Cornell University and went on to practice architecture for twenty-five years with distinguished New York City firms including Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and Richard Meier & Partners. He met his future husband Abbey on Memorial Day in 1982 in a leather bar in New York's Meat Packing District. Abbey was a Stonewall baby. The couple returned to quiet Ithaca, New York in 2000. Miles worked on local higher education projects while Abbey joined the Finger Lakes Land Trust.

They retired to New Mexico in 2016. Miles's first memoir, Miles's World, was published by Secord Books in 2021. Three subsequent memoirs, Reckoning, Upon Arrival, and Places and Faces were published by Sunstone Press.