Tiya Miles

Tiya Miles is an American historian and author, a professor at Harvard University and a MacArthur Fellow. She specialises in the histories of Native American peoples and African Americans, and the intersection of those histories. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, she studied at Harvard and received her PhD from the University of Minnesota. Miles's books include Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2005) and The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (2017). All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (2021) reconstructs the story of a cotton sack passed from an enslaved woman named Rose to her daughter Ashley when they were separated by sale, and eventually inherited by Ashley's granddaughter. The book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 2022, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and numerous other prizes. Miles is one of the foremost scholars of Native American and African American history and is widely regarded as a major public historian. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.