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

Miller’s first novel The Hunt for the Peggy C is scheduled for publican by Bancroft Press in November 2022.

As a foreign correspondent, Miller covered wars in Beirut, Chad and Eritrea as well as special assignments in Libya, Bulgaria, Tunis and India. He traveled with Pope John Paul II and covered such varied stories as the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, elections in Malta, 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 worked as an investigative reporter and state capital bureau chief. He was part of a team of reporters that wrote a series that helped trigger education 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 the Herald-Leader’s city editor for more than four years before being named executive editor of the Centre Daily Times (State College, Pa.) in August 1996.

While he was in charge, the paper was named one of 18 best designed newspapers in the world every year by the Society of News Design. It also was named best newspaper of its size in Pennsylvania for three years in a row by the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association.

In 1999, Miller was named executive editor of the Tallahassee Democrat (a Knight Ridder newspaper like the Herald-Leader and the Centre Daily Times.) He oversaw the paper’s coverage of the 2000 presidential election, including the chaotic 36-day-period of trying to determine who actually had won.

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 achieved a life-long dream of writing screenplays and TV shows. 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 (currently on Peacock TV) and; Ghost in the Family.

In September 2010, Miller was hired as publisher of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor. The newspaper was named New England’s 2010 Newspaper of the Year for both daily and Sunday editions by the New England Newspaper & Press Association.

In 2012 he was honored to be elected to The Associated Press board of directors and to be 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 classes at The University of Kentucky and Transylvania University.

His wife Margo, a former college English teacher, is a potter. Their daughter Allison Miller is an actress currently starring on the ABC series A Million Little Things.