Tiya Miles won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for “All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.” According to the National Book Award Judges, this is:
A brilliant, original work, All That She Carried presents a Black woman’s countercompilation 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.
Here is how the New York Times described the book:
“All That She Carried” is a remarkable book, striking a delicate balance between two seemingly incommensurate approaches: Miles’s fidelity to her archival material, as she coaxes out facts grounded in the evidence; and her conjectures about this singular object, as she uses what is known about other enslaved women’s lives to suppose what could have been. “This is not a traditional history,” Miles writes in her introduction. “It leans toward evocation rather than argumentation, and is rather more meditation than monograph.”
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