Audio

“Tiya’s Interview on the Podcast Art Works“ — Tiya discusses the challenges of writing a novel as an historian, the freedom in fiction to explore new themes and ideas, and how her experiences writing her debut novel helped shape her writing in All That She Carried. Aired Jun 21, 2023. Produced by the National Endowment for the Arts.

“A Historian Reckons With Gaps in the Archives” — WNYC Studios On The Media host Brooke Gladstone asks Tiya about her meditative approach to history and her career as a historical fiction writer. Miles explains what she learned about the women behind Ashley’s sack by combing the archives, and using her imagination to consider what their lives looked like. Aired March 3, 2023.

“The Problem with Ghosts: The ghosts that visit us, the ghosts that never do, and the ghosts that walk among us.” — On this episode of This American Life, Tiya talks with reporter Chenjerai Kumanyika on the topic of ghost tours. Tiya shares how her research on these stories led her to discover an industry built on the fabricated lives and deaths of enslaved people and their enslavers. [Coverage of the Savannah ghost stories starts at minute 8:34. Tiya begins speaking at minute 16:00.] Episode 793 aired on March 10, 2023.

“Ideas with Nahlah Ayed” — A cotton sack from the time of slavery bears the first names of a mother and her daughter, who was sold at the age of nine. Tiya scours the historical documentary record to discover who these women were and reveals their story of love in her book, All That She Carried — winner of the 2022 Cundill History Prize. Aired: Feb. 20, 2023

“Black Native History with Dr. Tiya Miles” —  On the first episode in the series Black Native History on All My Relations Podcast, Tiya talks with the hosts about the historical foundations and intersection of relationships between Black and Native populations starting with the circumstances of their introduction during the time of the white settler invasion of the Americas.

“’All That She Carried’ tells the story of generations of Black women and the love that binds them” — Tiya talks to NPR‘s Here & Now host Scott Tong about her latest book All That She Carried, a nominee for the 2021 National Book Award, and how “Ashley’s sack is a different kind of monument to the past; it’s not huge, it’s not made of stone, it’s not in the middle of a town square, and yet it speaks as loudly…” Listen to Tiya’s interview.

“How A Cotton Sack, Passed Down Over Generations, Tells A Larger Story About Slavery – NPR” — In this interview Tiya talks with NPR’s Arun Venugopal about her book All That She Carried — highlighting the story of a single cotton sack passed down over generations; from Rose, an enslaved woman, who gives the sack to her young daughter Ashley before she is sold to eventually finding its way to her great-granddaughter Ruth who embroiders the sack. Venugopal summarizes, “In the words of author Tiya Miles, this book is about the burdens of being human in an inhumane world, and about how Black women in particular have responded to systemic erasure with art, compassion and love.” Listen to Tiya’s interview (transcript available).

Tiya talks with the hosts of the podcast The Extreme History Project: The Dirt on the Past about her book All That She Carried — why she felt compelled to write about this significant object, her process, and why this story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women is important today as we, as a nation, struggle with how to understand our hard histories and reconcile our past in a way that can help us move forward together. Episode date August 25, 2021. Listen to the interview on Apple Podcasts or listen online.

“Rising Sea Levels Threaten MBTA’s Blue Line“ — Tiya discusses her new book, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, on Radio Boston (WBUR) with host Tiziana Dearing. June 2021.

“The WhiteWashed Ghost” — In The History of Ghosts, a series on BBC Radio, Kirsty Logan explores the history of ghost lore. In episode 6, “The Whitewashed Ghost” (air date October 26, 2020), the topic is one of which Tiya is deeply familiar — the romanticization of relationships between slave owners and enslaved young women and girls. In the “Extra Interview,” Tiya shares her experiences of stumbling into the world of Ghost Tours in the Southern United States, how the stories we tell, and how we tell them, can reshape the way we experience history as well as the present day, and how these experiences inspired her to write her own ghost story, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts. Listen to Tiya’s in-depth interview: The Haunted South.