Tiya Miles, 2007
An interview of Tiya Miles (History, Harvard), an SAR resident scholar in 2007-2008, appeared in the New York Times Book Review’s “By the Book” section on October 15. In the interview, Miles describes her childhood passion for reading:
“Reading became my escape and joy in elementary school. My favorite author was Madeleine L’Engle, whose books I came to know through the wonderful gift of a fifth-grade teacher, who read “A Wrinkle in Time” aloud to our class. I devoured that series, identifying with Meg, the plain older sister who had her own hidden gifts. In middle school I would ride the city bus to the public library and check out L’Engle’s novels for teens.”
That childhood passion has obviously paid off. In addition to the book she worked on while at SAR, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (2010), Miles is the author of such works as All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (2021), which won nearly a dozen major prizes, including the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. Her most recent work is Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation.
Tiya Miles is the fourth SAR scholar—along with Lucas Bessire, David Treuer, and Ned Blackhawk—to be a finalist or winner of a National Book Award in the past decade.