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Writing Women’s Lives

Writer’s Lab with Tiya Miles

In this workshop, participants will explore multiple dimensions of writing about the lives of women. We will discuss what draws us to this subject matter and what we seek to find when we write about our female family members, women in our community, women in history, or even ourselves. We will discuss various forms (history, fiction, memoir, journaling), as well as the challenges and rewards of this kind of writing. The lab will include writing prompts and exercises.

PRESENTER BIO: Tiya Miles is the author of eight books, including four prize-winning histories about race and slavery in the American past. 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 latest work is Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. 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 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, and she is the author of the novel, The Cherokee Rose, a ghost story set in the Native American plantation South.

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.

This program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. It is a part of the Writing Track of Jax Book Fest 2025: Writer’s Day!

Pre-registration is strongly recommended (space is limited) and must be completed at least 24 hours prior to the start time. Note: A Jacksonville Public Library card and PIN are required to register online. If you do not have a card, click here to apply online. 

Pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act, accommodations for persons with disabilities are available upon request. Please allow 1–2 business days to process. Last-minute requests will be accepted, but may not be possible to fulfill. Please ask for Learning Services at (904) 255-2665 or email JPLPrograms@coj.net.

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