About W. Jason Miller

W. Jason Miller

"After launching my last book in Washington, D.C., I decided to tell the audience an introductory story about how Langston Hughes was 'discovered' as a poet while working as a busboy at a nearby hotel.  When I came to Raleigh, NC, I decided to again connect Hughes to the local area, this time, North Carolina.  After I approached the front of the bookstore, I told the crowd that when Hughes was once asked to write the liner notes to a forthcoming album, he replied, “Why yes, I’d be happy to, Nina!”  The mouths of everyone fell wide open, and a collective gasp stole the air.  Musician Nina Simone is a North Carolina icon, and I knew, right then, I had to learn everything about their relationship.  Six years later, I’m now ready to tell the full story of their unknown relationship to the world."        

Miller has a habit of finding hidden threads-- connecting Hughes to Martin Luther King Jr., to Nina Simone,-- and to some of the most transformative moments of the twentieth century. He has spent the last two decades as a cultural detective.

His first book, Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture (University Press of Florida, 2011), examined how Hughes used poetry as a witness to historyt during an era when journalism looked away. His second, Origins of the Dream: Hughes's Poetry and King's Rhetoric (University Press of Florida, 2015), made the case that the imagery at the heart of King's "I Have a Dream" speech was borrowed — deliberately and covertly — from Hughes's poems. In researching that book, Miller tracked down a reel-to-reel tape sitting in a public library in Rocky Mount, North Carolina: a cracked, rust-spotted box with a pencil note inside reading "Dr. Martin Luther King speech — please do not erase." When he played it, he heard King use the dream refrain for the first time, nine months before the March on Washington. The discovery made national headlines and was featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, BBC, NPR, and The Rachel Maddow Show.

His biography Langston Hughes (Reaktion/University of Chicago Press, 2020) repositioned Hughes as an international literary figure — a man who led the Harlem Renaissance, shaped the Civil Rights Movement, and mentored the next generation of Black artists from a careful distance. One of those artists was a teenage girl from Tryon, North Carolina, named Eunice Waymon, who Hughes met in Asheville in 1949 (before later becoming Nina Simone).

That encounter is where Miller's newest book begins. Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power (UNC Press, 2026) tells the story of one of the most important — and least known — friendships of the civil rights era. Hughes and Simone collaborated on four recordings, co-wrote the lyrics that gave the Black Power movement its phrase, and supported each other through the most politically charged years of both their careers. Drawing on new firsthand accounts, letters, and archival materials, Miller brings that story to light for the first time.

Alongside his books, Miller has built an ecosystem of digital and documentary film work. The Backlash Blues project is an immersive online archive tracing the Hughes-Simone collaboration. King and the Klan: A Visual Experience reconstructed a forgotten day in civil rights history using 150 undeveloped photographs and 18 seconds of recovered color footage. And Origin of the Dream, a feature-length PBS documentary produced with Emmy Award-winner Neal Hutcheson, is currently available for nationwide broadcast on PBS June 1, 2026 as part of America 250. It features Ambassador Andrew Young, Reverend William Barber II, actor Danny Glover, and the final on-camera interview with Julian Bond.

Miller is a Distinguished Professor of English at NC State. He was a National Humanities Center Fellow in 2022-23.

Recognition

The awards have accumulated quietly alongside the work. Miller has been named a Distinguished Professor (2024), inducted into the NC State Academy of Outstanding Teachers (2017), the Academy of Outstanding Faculty in Extension and Engagement (2020), and the Research Leadership Academy (2022). He has received the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor Award and the Alumni Outstanding Outreach Award, served as the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at the African American Cultural Center (2019–20), and holds a fellowship from the National Humanities Center (2022–23). The Mayor of Rocky Mount named him an Honorary Citizen in 2017. He has secured $350,000 in competitive funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Teagle Foundation, and was invited to provide editorial feedback for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, Volume VIII at Stanford University.

His scholarship has been published and translated on every continent. Coverage has appeared in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, The Guardian, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, USA Today, and across hundreds of outlets worldwide.