Profile Books scoops Miles' National Book award-winning All That She Carried

Profile Books has scooped the "deeply moving history" All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Harvard professor Tiya Miles.

Calah Singleton, assistant editor, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, including audio, from Denise Cronin and Rachel Kind at Random House USA. The book will be published on 13th July 2023, and the e-book and audio editions are on sale now.

Told through the lens of an antique seed sack passed down by Black women across generations, it is a history of mothers and daughters, parents and children, and a greater community struggling to survive the dark days of American slavery and beyond.

The publisher’s synopsis said: "In 1850s South Carolina, Rose, an enslaved woman, faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few items. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.

"That, in itself, is a story. But it’s not the whole story. How does one uncover the lives of people who, in their day, were considered property?"

Alongside the Cundill History Prize and National Book Award for Nonfiction, All That She Carried has received the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, among other prizes.

Singleton said: "All That She Carried is a masterclass in bringing the past to life. Tiya Miles has created an evocative and challenging portrait of America, using exquisite prose and expert research to explore the histories of the archivally marginalised.

"Reading All That She Carried was transformational for me, and I’m overjoyed to have acquired it for Profile. I was drawn in by Miles’ storytelling, transfixed by the ways in which she resurrects the experiences of my foremothers and asks us what we preserve and whose stories we choose to tell."

Miles is professor of history, Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Miles is also the author of the Frederick Douglass Prize-winning The Dawn of Detroit (The New Press), among other books.

She said: "I am delighted to see All That She Carried produced for a trans-Atlantic readership in a beautiful new edition by Profile Books. The predominant setting is Charleston in Carolina, a dazzling English colony that became a wealthy American state and a terrain of trauma for Indigenous and African people forced to produce rice and cotton while being subject to sale.

"But out of this scene of exploitation, families persevered by engaging in acts of bravery, creativity and love. Ashley’s Sack, a bag treasured by one such family, is a human record of care, preparedness and resilience that can inspire us all in our own time of political change."