G. Samantha Rosenthal (she/her/hers) is an independent journalist, professional historian, and award-winning author with an expertise in reporting on history, religion, music, arts, and culture. As a storyteller, she holds a special commitment to amplifying the diverse voices and movements of Appalachia and the U.S. South.

She is the author of two books, most recently Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City (UNC Press), which is a history, theory, and memoir of Roanoke’s LGBTQ+ history.

Her writing has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, Salon, The Advocate, The Conversation, Southern Cultures, National Parks, Lilith, Sojourners, VAN, and Them.

Samantha’s work has been recognized with awards and honorable mentions from the National Council on Public History, the Oral History Association, the LGBTQ+ History Association, the American Society for Environmental History, and the Working Class Studies Association.

I have an established track record as a non-fiction writer, in both scholarly and popular publications, including the Los Angeles Times and Scientific American. I have published two non-fiction books with university presses, both of which explore historical topics, the latter of which blends history, theory, and memoir in its exploration of Roanoke’s past. I have published several works of creative non-fiction, including an essay about my experiences as a renter, and now a homeowner, in Roanoke’s Old Southwest neighborhood in the 2025 collection, To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers (UPK Press).

In addition to my career as a journalist, as well as my former career as a professor, I am currently enrolled in Hollins’ MFA Program in Creative Writing, where I am working on a novel which explores queer/trans Southern history and memory, with a major focus on Virginia. In the MFA program, I also study and write widely across three different genres: creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.

As a proud Roanoker (so proud that I wrote a book on the city’s history!), I am interested in the Writer by Bus program for the opportunity to work on a substantial new creative project focused on the history of transportation and urban change in Roanoke. I love riding the bus—I used to ride it at least once a week from my home in Old Southwest to commute to my former job—and I love the opportunity that the Writer by Bus program affords to explore the city with new eyes, and to think through stories that represent the diversity of this great city, across all its bus lines.

My proposed project for the 2026 Writer by Bus program will be a chapbook that explores the history of Roanoke’s public transportation system. In addition to riding all the bus routes and ruminating on the histories that these routes traverse, I will also conduct research at the Virginia Room (which I have been using for over ten years as a researcher!) on the history of the city’s transportation system, its intersections with histories of Jim Crow segregation and red lining, and how waves of change in the city’s transportation infrastructure correspond with larger societal and political changes in local, state, and national history. My project will be a work of creative non-fiction, taking the form of a lyric essay—including prose and poetry—that explores the history of transportation and urban change in this city that I so love.

In my history/memoir Living Queer History, I tell the story of moving here in 2015 as a newly “out” queer person, unsure and afraid about what it would be like to be an out queer person in this small city on the edge of Appalachia. (I moved from New York, where I was born and raised.) In Living Queer History, I talk about meeting queer and trans elders, hearing (and recording) their stories, and how these elders inspired me to come out more fully into my authentic self in Roanoke, transitioning as a transgender woman and living a more authentic life in this diverse, welcoming city. Through my work with the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project (which I co-founded in 2015), we have brought renewed recognition to the city as a queer community, including Old Southwest’s historic role as the city’s gayborhood.

These days, as a full-time freelance writer and journalist, I continue to report on interesting stories in Roanoke: from the history of the landfill at Washington Park (in the Roanoke Rambler), to the city’s underground literary scene (in the Roanoker magazine), to the city’s incredible public library system (in the Rambler)—all published just this past year! I am hopeful to continue reporting and writing on Roanoke’s people and places as a freelance journalist in 2026.

Roanoke also inspires my creative work at Hollins. One of the main characters in my novel that I am writing at Hollins is a white working-class transgender woman who lived in Roanoke in the 1970s. There is a lot of Roanoke, and Roanoke’s history, in my novel.

Finally, since quitting academia, I have also taken up work as a part-time piano teacher, teaching lessons to adult students. Roanoke inspires me musically (with major inspirations like Roanoke-born jazz pianist Don Pullen!), as well as writerly.