Meet National Book Award Winner Tiya Miles at Jax Book Fest 2025

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# Exploring and Collecting African American History

Harriet Tubman is, if surveys are to be trusted, one of the ten most famous Americans ever born. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood. Tiya Miles’s Night Flyer changes all that, probing the ecological reality of Tubman’s surroundings and examining her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs.

Jax Book Fest: Writers' Day

Learn more about the book and the National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author at Jax Book Fest 2025. Tiya Miles is our featured author for the first half of this annual event. Things kick off from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 13. in the Conference Center at the Main Library in Downtown Jacksonville. There will also be a "bonus" author talk with the later that same day, which serves as the "keynote" for this conference-style event. For a complete schedule of workshops and a list of other special guests, please visit jaxlibrary.org/WritersDay.

# Meet Tiya Miles

Writing Women's Lives: Writer's Lab

What do we seek to find when we write about our female family members, women in our community, women in history, or even ourselves? Aspiring and up-and-coming local authors will have a chance to learn from this National Book Award-winning author in our featured  writing workshop with Tiya Miles from 1 to 2 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 13, in the Multipurpose Room. Through a series of writing prompts and exercises, covering various forms (history, fiction, memoir, journaling), participants will explore the challenges and rewards of this kind of writing. 

Pre-register now    Find more Writer's Lab workshops 

Note: Space is limited. You'll need a Jacksonville Public Library card to pre-register. Walk-ins are welcome (if seats are available). This workshop is part of the Writing Track. Depending on where you are in your writing/publishing journey, you may also like the Publishing or Marketing track.

Lit Chat (Author Interview) & Book Signing

After all of the Writer's Lab workshops conclude at 3:30 p.m., our featured author will sit down for a bonus Lit Chat Interview with Tammy Cherry from 4 to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 13, in the Hicks Auditorium. An audience Q&A and book signing will follow the interview, with books available for purchase on-site from San Marco Books & More.

Save your seat    Find more Lit Chat programs 

# Learn More About the Author

Tiya Miles is the author of eight books, including four prizewinning histories about race and slavery. She is a two-time winner of Yale’s Frederick Douglass Prize and a two-time winner of the National Council on Public History Book Award. Her 2021 National Book Award winner, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller that won eleven historical and literary prizes, including the Cundill History Prize. All That She Carried was named A Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, The Atlantic, Time, and more. 

Her latest work, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith and Dreams of a Free People, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography.  Her other nonfiction works include Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, The Dawn of Detroit, Tales from the Haunted South, The House on Diamond Hill, and Ties That Bind. Miles publishes essays and reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and other media outlets. Miles is also the author of the novel, The Cherokee Rose, a ghost story set in the Native American plantation South.

Check out more books by this author at your library.

Miles has consulted with colleagues at historic sites and museums on representations of slavery, African American material culture, and the Black-Indigenous intertwined past, including, most recently, the Fabric of a Nation quilt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been supported by a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. 

Miles was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she is currently the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University. You can find her online at https://tiyamiles.com/ or on Facebook and Instagram  @TiyaMiles.

Read More Books Like Night Flyer and All That She Carried

1. Slaves In the Family by Edward Ball
2. Master Slave Husband Wife: an Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo
3. In Search of the Promised Land : a Black Family and the Old South by John Hope Franklin
4. Those Who Saw the Sun : African American Oral Histories from the Jim Crow South by Jaha Nailah Avery
5. The Black family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 by Herbert G. Gutman
6. Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts by Crystal Wilkinson
7. The Hairstons : an American Family in Black and White by Henry Wiencek
8. The Stained Glass Window : a Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958 by David Levering Lewis
9. The Diary Keepers WorldWar II In the Netherlands, As Written by the People who Lived Through It by Nina Siegel
10. Undaunted : How Women Changed American Journalism by Brooke Kroeger
11. Women of the Blue and Gray : True Civil War Stories of Mothers, Medics, Soldiers, and Spies by Marianne Monson
12. The Radium Girls : the Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

Jax Book Fest 2025: September 13 & 20

Held annually at the Main Library in downtown Jacksonville, Jax Book Fest is our biggest, boldest celebration of authors, authorship, and the written word. It's also a great opportunity for Jax readers to find and support local authors.

Note: On Saturday, Sept. 20, the focus shifts to young readers and families. Youth Readers' Day will include more than 60 local authors of children’s and teen books and Lit Chat author talks with New York Times bestselling authors Shannon Messenger and Mac Barnett. 

Writers' Day, Youth Readers' Day, and all related programs are free to attend.

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