2011 MacArthur Fellow,2021 National Book Award Winner, historian, and novelist Tiya Miles discusses how fiction and history meet in her novel.

Tiya Miles is best known as a historian and the author of the National Book Award winner All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake. But Tiya had preceded All That She Carried with a novel The Cherokee Rose, published in 2015, which she has revised and has just been reissued with a new introduction.  The novel moves from contemporary Georgia to the early 1800s and back again, as it explores the intertwined and sometime painful histories of indigenous peoples and enslaved Black communities and those repercussions still felt in the 21^st century. Drawn from Miles’s imagination but based in her scholarly research,  The Cherokee Rose foregrounds the voices and experiences of women: Black, indigenous, multi-racial, and white while it shines a light on a little-known history.  In this podcast, Tiya Miles talks about the challenges for her as an historian in writing a novel, what fiction allows her to explore, how writing the novel helped her think creatively when she conceptualized and wrote All That She Carried We also discuss her winning the MacArthur Fellowship and the freedom it gave her, her reasons for revising The Cherokee Rose, and how she draws hope from the creative determination of the women that she has spent her life studying.