SERENA B. MILLER was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, the youngest of four girls. Much of her childhood was spent playing on relatives’ front porches while listening to stories about the past—experiences that would profoundly shape her future as a storyteller.

She married a hometown boy studying to be a minister, and together they raised three sons while serving churches in various states. During those early years, she worked a series of part-time jobs that would later enrich her writing. In Tennessee, she worked as a clerk at Vanderbilt Hospital’s ER. In Kentucky, she worked as a secretary for a small concrete business. In Michigan, she became a court reporter for Detroit’s Friend of the Court system.

Eventually, she and her family returned home to Ohio where her husband was hired to preach for the country church she had attended as a child.

“It was a good choice for us. The congregation flourished and the echoes of those old-time family storytellers began coming back to me. I started typing out my own stories with the hope of getting them published someday. My son, Caleb, was a great encourager. Every afternoon when he came home from school, he wanted to read what I’d written that morning. I figured if I could hold a twelve-year-old’s interest, there might be hope for me as a writer.”

Raising a family on a country preacher’s salary did not allow much wiggle-room to pay for the writer’s workshops and conferences she needed, so she found part-time work stocking greeting cards for Hallmark. It was the perfect job for a wannabe writer.

“The hours were flexible, the pay decent, and I enjoyed interacting with people who needed help choosing the right card,” she remembers.

Her husband and sons were pleased when she published her first book, Love Finds You In Sugarcreek, in 2010, and thrilled when a Hollywood producer read the novel three years later and made it into an award-winning UPTV movie that captured the coveted Templeton Epiphany Award.

“I was as astonished as everyone else in my life,” she says. “I was a small-town preacher’s wife who was getting to attend a red carpet event in Hollywood. Finding something to wear was a challenge. The only thing in my closet were T-shirts, jeans, and flowered church dresses.”

Since then, she has become a USA Today Bestselling Author and won numerous awards, including Romance Writers of America RITA award for The Measure of Katie Calloway, American Christian Fiction Writers CAROL award for A Promise To Love, and her Under A Blackberry Moon was a finalist in the CHRISTY awards.

Her storytelling success has continued with two additional Hallmark Channel movie adaptations: An Uncommon Grace and Moriah’s Lighthouse, the latter filmed against the stunning backdrop of coastal France.

“It feels like I’ve come full circle,” Serena says. “When I was stocking greeting cards, I used to daydream about writing a book that was good enough to be chosen for a Hallmark movie. Now I’ve had three—that dream became a reality beyond anything I could have imagined.”