Marty Gordon
NRVsports@mainstreetnewspapers.com
A trip to Calfee Park for a baseball game has led to the release of a new fiction book by a Christiansburg librarian called “Meet Me Under the Lights.”
The book is the first for Cassie Miller.
“Years ago, I attended my first baseball game at Calfee Park, and I was immediately drawn in to not only the beauty of the park itself and the way it seemed a perfect fit inside the mountains and town of Pulaski, but also toward the way that entire town came out to support these athletes at every game,” Miller said.
Calfee Park is located in Pulaski and has been home to minor league baseball since 1935 and currently is home to Summer League wooden baseball’s Pulaski River Turtles. The facility was built by the Works Progress Administration during the Depression and has hosted various affiliated minor league teams like the Yankees, Braves and Mariners. Calfee is the ninth oldest minor league park in the United States, being listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register.
Miller’s new book is the pitch-perfect coming-of-age tale, which combines a
small town setting, childhood friends to lovers, rival families, social class differences and drama and the high stakes of a baseball championship game on the line.
Instead of being based in Pulaski, the fictional tale takes place in Fairfield, North Carolina.
Eliza Crowley is known to all as the Princess of Fairfield, a farm town in North Carolina that loves two things—tradition and baseball. Although Eliza loves “the game,” her life goal is to become a lighting designer on Broadway. Shaking off her reputation as the rich girl, this summer she’s focused on her town’s community theater production, and nothing will stand in her way. That is, until Reed Fulton, the grandson of a struggling Fairfield farmer and ace pitcher of the Fulton Hawks, returns to town.
Reed dreams of putting the catastrophe of last season behind him and leading the Hawks to a championship victory against the Crowley Cardinals, a game that will finally settle the score in his family’s decades-long feud with the other family.
A former Christiansburg High School English teacher turned librarian, Miller wrote the book during a semester she taught an Advanced Creative Writing course, making a bet with her students that she would show her draft if her students shared their drafts with the class. Ultimately, she said her goal was to remind her students and readers to never underestimate the underdog.
“My hope was that they’d see that you are never too old to try a new dream or
to reach for something you once thought impossible,” Miller said about her experience drafting the novel. “I write stories for the kids who get overshadowed and overlooked because of biases or generalizations because I was that kid, and nothing made me happier than proving those people and sometimes even my own self-doubt wrong.”
Miller has a teaching degree from Radford University and library endorsement from the University of Virginia. She wears many hats but finds her favorites are “stage and lighting director,” “eccentric storyteller,” and “boy-mom.”
She currently resides in southwest Virginia with her family and an ever-growing number of cardigans and nerdy bookish shirts.
Miller describes her first book as the story of Crowley and Fulton, two teenagers from rival families who are competing for ownership of their town’s famed baseball stadium. But as the young couple begins what could be a home-run romance, the 30-year feud between their families may just tear them–and their dreams–apart.
“I wrote this story as a tribute to my favorite sport, baseball, and to honor the people and places that raised me: blue-collar workers, farmers, small-business owners, and small towns. I have always been drawn to stories about the underdogs and the overlooked who rise up and surprise people in unexpected ways, so I knew my book needed to tell those kinds of stories,” she said.
It was that visit to the local baseball park, which struck a nerve for Miller.
“I started to think about how great it was that a stadium like Calfee Park existed in such a small town and how beneficial it must be to that town and its revenue. That thought then led me down a bunch of ‘what if’ paths where I dreamt up the idea of two families fighting for ownership of that stadium and of an ace-pitcher, grandson to one of those families, who is out for redemption,” she said.
So far, the response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive. “Meet Me Under the Lights” has already been recognized as an Indies Introduce Kids Winter / Spring 2026 YA Selection and has received glowing reviews from Kirkus and Booklist. Miller also has been recently named a Spring 2026 Writer to Watch from Publishers Weekly.
The book will hit shelves on Mar. 3 wherever books are sold including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target, Walmart, etc. It is currently available for pre-order, and if you pre-order from Blacksburg Books, you will also receive character art cards by a local artist as well as a bookmark with your book.
It is available in paperback for $13.99 and digital (Kindle) for $8.99, and it will also be available via audiobook as well.
According to Miller, there are more young adult contemporary romance books in her future, but she cannot release details about those just yet.
Those interested in following her journey to publication or learning more about upcoming projects can follow her on Instagram@cassiemillerwrites.
