A Simple Cotton Sack: A Conversation about African American Women, Trauma, and Resistance

Join the Newberry Library for a conversation between Tiya Miles and Megan Sweeney focusing on the ways that women exercise agency under significant constraints and find meaning and beauty amid pain. In a display case at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is a rough cotton bag embroidered with a remembrance that evokes a sweeping family story of loss and of love, passed down through generations. This inspired Tiya Miles to carefully unearth these women's faint presence in archival records. She follows the paths of their lives—and the lives of so many women like them—in her recent book, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. This revelatory history of the experience of slavery and the uncertain freedom afterward won the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

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