Tiya Miles is the author of seven books, including four prize-winning histories about race and slavery in the American past. Her latest history, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller that won eleven historical and literary prizes, including the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2022 Cundill History Prize. All That She Carried was named A Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, The Atlantic, Time, and more. Her other scholarly works include: The Dawn of Detroit, Tales from the Haunted South, The House on Diamond Hill, Ties That Bind, and the forthcoming Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation.

Miles publishes essays in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and other media outlets, and she has consulted with colleagues at historic sites and museums on representations of slavery, African American material culture, and the Black-Native intersectional past, including, most recently, the Fabric of a Nation quilt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been supported by a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Miles’s newest book is her debut time-bridge novel, The Cherokee Rose, a ghost story set in the plantation South and based on historical events. She was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she is currently the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.

Photo credit: Stephanie Mitchell