Linda Kenney Miller is a graduate of Fisk University with a B.A. in English. She taught English and Reading in the District of Columbia Public School System, while taking graduate courses at Howard University, where she published Realism in Black Poetry as part of a curriculum guide for public school teachers. In 1975, she entered the health care field, working as a medical administrator for her father, Howard W. Kenney, M.D., and remained in the field for over thirty years. She also started a medical management consultant business, H.W.K. Associates, which served numerous physicians in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area for many years. Concerned that the practice of medicine was being supplanted by the business of medicine in the 21st century, she decided to combine her literary and medical skills to write Beacon on the Hill, in honor of the early black medical pioneers whose altruism and sacrifice defined medical care in that era.