Meet Miguel Fuller: HITS 96.1 Morning Personality
The on-air personality has made a career out of his radio geekery and gift of gab
“I would describe myself as an annoying kid,” Miguel Fuller says with a laugh. “I was always talking, always wanting to be the center of attention. I just wanted to take up space wherever I was. In photos, I would be arms outstretched, like a starfish.”
As co-host of Miguel & Holly on HITS 96.1, the 39-year-old on-air personality gets to take up space on the airwaves each weekday from 5 to 10 a.m. Listeners know him as the fun, unfiltered counterpart to Holly O’Connor, his longtime friend and colleague. The duo discusses pop culture, city happenings, and personal anecdotes that jump-start conversations with callers who can relate to—or top—their funniest stories. Popular segments include “Shoot Your Shot,” “Queen City Confessions,” and “Am I the A-Hole?” Not much is off-limits. Share your salary? Sure! Refuse to eat at a potluck? Let’s discuss. Your date had an emotional support plant named Greg? Tell us more.
“People love talking about themselves,” Fuller says. “They love sharing their experiences, their pain, joys, and trauma. If you give someone an open vessel to talk about it, they’ll open up. Audio is very personal. It’s you listening in your car by yourself. Mornings are very ritualistic, and we become part of that process. The gateway drug of our show is ‘Blown Off.’ Then you listen more, then submit something to ‘Queen City Confessions.’”
On-air personality is a role he’s been training for his whole life. Growing up in Atlanta, Fuller recited the lunch menu each week on his middle school’s radio station. It helped him overcome his stutter, which he says still comes out sometimes when he’s excited or nervous. “When I got to middle and high school, I was bused up to Roswell, so it was three hours on the bus every morning,” he says. “I had six years of digesting Atlanta morning radio.”
He studied broadcasting at Georgia Southern University and got an internship at Clear Channel (now iHeart Radio) doing promotions. His first job out of college was producing a conservative news talk morning show in Savannah, but he found his groove as the overnight fill-in on the local pop radio station. That led to an on-air gig in Panama City, Florida. He met O’Connor at a radio conference in Charlotte in 2008. They instantly clicked and started to work together a few months later.
In 2015, the pair caught the attention of producers at HOT 101.5 in Tampa, where they co-hosted their morning show for the next seven years—and were roommates for the first five. “I don’t know that the stars would have aligned with anyone else this way,” O’Connor says. “We’ve just always been compatible.”
“Our show is based on friendship and everybody sitting on the couch with us,” Fuller says. “When we lived together, Holly had these big red couches where we’d sit, just talking about life and important things.”
Miguel & Holly was as much about their listeners’ stories as it was about their own milestones. Fuller’s husband, Abe Gadikian (“my emotional support human”), proposed on the air, and listeners got to follow their wedding plans and appearance on HGTV’s 100 Day Dream Home. “But there’s a line between personal and private,” Fuller says. “There are things I want to talk about, but it affects my husband. It’s the same with Holly and her daughter. You have to use a scalpel with how you tell stories.”
In 2022, iHeart Radio offered them the morning slot in Charlotte after “The Ace & TJ Show” ended its run. “There was lots of fear and trepidation,” Fuller says, “but I also knew that times change, and Charlotte had also changed and was ready for something different.”
Fuller has been open about his food addiction, taking Ozempic, and his place in the LGBTQ+ community. “One of my first questions was, ‘Can Charlotte handle the show we’d put on?’” he says. “I’ve been successful being an openly gay Black man in Tampa … but I was unsure about a new Southern city.”
O’Connor shared some of that trepidation. “I was worried because he was worried, but at the same time, I wasn’t as worried, only because we’d started doing radio in the Panhandle, which is very Southern and very small-town, and our listeners adored Miguel,” she says. “And this was in ’08 or ’09, so times were different. But he is such a magnetic person. He transcends those labels.”
She was right. Charlotte listeners embraced him, and his sexual orientation has been a non-issue.
Fuller makes his job look easy, but there’s a lot more involved than his on-air gig. His mornings begin at 3:15, and he gets to the station around 4:30 a.m. to finalize the day’s segments. After the show, he records the next day’s commercials and goes to meetings. Three days a week, he and O’Connor record and livestream their podcast, Miguel and Holly Uncensored. He spends afternoons responding to social media messages and catching up on pop-culture headlines to gather material for the next day’s show. If he isn’t emceeing an event like Charlotte magazine’s Top Workplaces banquet (as he did in November), he has dinner around 5:30 and is asleep by 9.
The self-proclaimed radio geek still loves to ask people where they’re from because he can usually tell you the Top 40 show in that city. “I’ve always wanted Miguel & Holly to be associated with the industry like that, and I’m feeling lots of gratitude for Charlotte for embracing us so quickly,” he says. “When we turn on those mics, I think: This is what college Miguel dreamed of.”
