Tiya Miles, Recent Modern Masters Reading Series Guest, Wins National Book Award

Tiya Miles, our most recent Modern Masters Reading Series guest, won the 2021 National Book Award for nonfiction for her book All She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, A Black Family Keepsake. Miles received this award on November 17, within weeks of her visit to Loyola.

The mission of the National Book Foundation, presenter of the award, is “to celebrate the best literature in America, expand its audience, and ensure that books have a prominent place in American culture.” This year’s judges included such acclaimed authors as Eula Biss, Ilya Kaminsky and Charles Yu.

According to the judges: “A brilliant, original work, All That She Carried presents a Black woman’s counter-compilation of lives that ordinary archives suppress. Tiya Miles’s graceful prose gives us narrative history, social history, and object history of women’s craft through the things Rose gave the daughter she was losing forever. With depth and breadth, Miles offers the visual record of love in the face of the child trafficking atrocities of slavery. This book is scholarship at its best and most heartrending.”

Tiya Miles is a professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. During her visit to Loyola, she read excerpts from All That She Carried and, in answering student questions, spoke with depth and honesty about her writing process.

Members of the Loyola community can watch a recording of Tiya Miles’ visit for the Modern Masters Reading Series through the Loyola Notre Dame Library.