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Charlotte author Vanessa Miller’s father had a gift for telling tales.
In fact, she says he was “a storyteller who never wrote a book.” Miller remembers a tale he told her one day when they were sitting on her grandmother’s porch in Dayton, Ohio, the city where Miller grew up. It was a beautiful story of joy and adventure. “And then he got to the end of the story, and I discovered that he’d been talking about a rat the whole time,” she says. “I couldn’t understand how he’d taken something so hideous and made me think it was beautiful. From that moment, I knew that was what I wanted to do.”
An ardent Christian, Miller began publishing novels in the early 2000s that were full of hopeful stories surrounding women of faith and their struggles. Her recent titles include her 2022 novels Something Good, which explores faith in the wake of a tragedy, and What We Found in Hallelujah, a novel about a family brought together by a hurricane. Her 2023 release, The Light on Halsey Street, examines a lifelong friendship and its challenges.
Miller then turned toward historical fiction, beginning with a story that belongs distinctly to North Carolina. A few years ago, she was emailing back and forth with Lisa Wingate, author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling novel Before We Were Yours. Wingate, who endorsed Miller’s novel Something Good, told Miller about a group of formerly enslaved men and women who fled Mississippi and founded a community near Hendersonville. Like most North Carolinians, Miller had never heard this history or the name Louella Bobo Montgomery, the woman who would reign as queen of this settlement, the Kingdom of Happy Land.
“Lisa said, ‘Vanessa, since you live in North Carolina, you might want to do some research on this story,’ ” Miller recalls. While most authors are generous, it’s rare to turn a good story loose, and even more rare to offer it to another writer. “She basically changed the trajectory of my career,” Miller says.
The American Queen was published in 2024 to rave reviews. Since then, Miller has continued to write historical fiction, including her 2025 novel, The Filling Station, which follows two sisters in the wake of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Her forthcoming novel, The Ladies’ Hall, explores the integration of Oberlin College and the true story of two of the Black women who fought for equality.
illustration by Andrea Cheung
Miller leans into the struggles that her characters face and often uses them to showcase the resilience of the spirit. She’s faced struggles of her own, perhaps none greater than the 2010 loss of her mother, with whom she was extremely close. Miller found herself wondering if she would ever write fiction again, but she held out hope that a change of scenery might help. She and her mother often traveled together, and they enjoyed their time in North Carolina, where the state’s independent bookstores were destinations for Miller to promote new books. “I had lived in Dayton all my life,” Miller says. “When I decided to move, I knew it was going to be North Carolina.”
After relocating to Charlotte in 2012, Miller returned to the page. She’d moved through the pain of loss and into something beautiful. She sees her work as a historical fiction writer much in the same way.
“No one wants to see their own pain,” she says. “Especially if it’s part of the past. We only want to see the beauty. I have been a writer who likes to show you the pain, the struggle. But I also show that we can heal. Only then can we see the beauty.”
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photograph by Matt Hulsman
The American Queen is a tautly paced and well-researched novel based on the life of Louella Bobo Montgomery, a woman who was born into enslavement in Mississippi. After Emancipation, Louella takes to the road with her husband, William, to find a land they can call their own. They leave behind a life scarred by lynchings and other horrors, but the road ahead is not clear for the couple or the groups of formerly enslaved men, women, and children they meet along the way. Eventually, their caravan makes its way into the mountains of North Carolina, where they have the chance to live a life of freedom and self-possession that had once been unimaginable. Miller excavates this buried history of struggle and triumph to tell a tale of resilience and hope, a story that every North Carolinian can celebrate.
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