Tiya Miles ’88 Wins Frederick Douglass Book Prize

On February 28th, Middlesex graduate Tiya Miles ’88 was awarded the Frederick Douglass Book Prize at the Gilder Lehrman Institute in New York City. The prize, given annually to the best book written in English on slavery or abolition, was awarded to Miles for her 2018 publication, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straights. Since its release, Dawn of Detroit has been showered with praise by reviewers, with Publishers Weekly declaring it a “necessary work of powerful, probing scholarship” and the Washington Post stating that “in her eloquent account, Miles conjures up a city of stark disparity and lives quashed.”

Miles is a professor of history and the Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011, and has written four books in addition to Dawn of Detroit. She recently wrote a New York Times op-ed in which she discusses her lasting friendship with a Middlesex classmate.