John Winn Miller is an award-winning investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, editor, newspaper publisher, screenwriter, movie producer, and now a novelist.

As a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press, Miller covered wars in Beirut, Chad, and Eritrea. He traveled with Pope John Paul II, and covered such varied stories as the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, Mafia busts, and terrorist attacks around the Mediterranean. He briefly served as Rome bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal/Europe before returning to his hometown to work for the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader.

In Lexington, Miller was part of a team of reporters that wrote a series that helped trigger educational reform in Kentucky. The series won the 1990 public service award from the Society of Professional Journalists, top honors from Investigative Reporters and Editors, the $25,000 Selden Ring award, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

He was named executive editor of the Centre Daily Times (State College, Pa.) in 1996 and executive editor of the Tallahassee Democrat (a Knight Ridder newspaper like the Herald-Leader and the Centre Daily Times) in 1999. When Knight-Ridder traded papers with Gannett in 2005, Miller was named publisher of one of the newly acquired papers, The Olympian in Olympia, Wa.

After McClatchy acquired Knight Ridder, Miller helped merge most of his paper’s operations with The Tacoma News-Tribune and then took early retirement in 2009.

He returned to Lexington, where he wrote screenplays and TV shows and partnered in a social media marking startup called Friends2Follow. 

Miller also helped produce four independent feature films: Hitting the Cycle with Bruce Dern; Armed Response, starring Ethan Evans and Michael Gladis and three generations of Arkins—Adam, Alan, and Ayote; Band of Robbers, written and directed by Adam and Aaron Nee, and Ghost in the Family. 

In September 2010, Miller was hired as publisher of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor. Two years later, he was elected to The Associated Press board of directors and selected as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes for the second year in a row. 

He retired again the next year to return home to Lexington, where he taught journalism at The University of Kentucky and Transylvania University.

Born and raised in Lexington KY, he attended Emory University in Atlanta before graduating from The University of Kentucky. 

He lives in Lexington with his wife Margo, a potter and former college English teacher. Their daughter Allison Miller is an actress-screenwriter-director currently starring on the ABC series A Million Little Things. 

This is Miller’s second novel.