Celia Hooper Miles, a 1960 Brevard alumna and former BC faculty member, has published her tenth novel, The Skeleton at the Old Painted Mill: A Marcy Dehanne Grist Mill Mystery. This work is the third installment in what Miles calls her “cozy mystery” series, which features a college instructor turned grist mill restoration consultant.
Over the course of her teaching career, Dr. Miles was a faculty member at Brevard College and then Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College for over three decades. Her late husband, Dr. Louis Miles, was a religion professor and former chair of BC’s Division of Social Studies and Religion. Together, they have established a number of funds to support students at Brevard College, including the Dr. Louis Miles Endowed Scholarship to support western North Carolina students who are majoring in Fine Arts.
Miles’s creative writing career kicked off after retirement, and her works have all been set in Western North Carolina. Her special interest in grist mills comes from her childhood in Jackson County. Miles writes, “I’d seen traces of one or two old mills and had photographed them. The ingenuity and technology they demonstrated intrigued me, as did the sense of community that developed around the rural mills.”