Tiya Miles

Tiya Miles is the author of three multiple prize-winning works in the history of early American race relations: Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom; The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story; and most recently, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits. She has also written historical fiction: The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist), shared her travels to "haunted" historic sites of slavery in a published lecture series, and written various articles and op-eds (in The New York Times, CNN.com, the Huffington Post) on women’s history, history and memory, black public culture, and black and indigenous interrelated experience. She is a past MacArthur Foundation Fellow (“genius award”) and Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow and a current National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award recipient. She taught on the faculty of the University of Michigan for sixteen years and is currently a Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University. Tiya was born and raised in Cincinnati, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, three children, and three pets. She is an avid reader of feminist mysteries, a passionate fan of old houses, and a loyal patron of Graeter’s ice cream in Cincinnati as well as Dairy Queen just about anywhere.