Wild Girls

"With delights and surprises at every turn, [this book] has given me a new pantheon of heroes to admire and emulate." -- Elizabeth Fenn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World
"A moving meditation on race, history, and possibility; an enticing invitation to seek renewal in green spaces; a rousing exhortation to women and girls to claim freedom in the wild; Tiya Miles offers us a rhapsodic account of nature as a respite from, and remedy for, the failings of society and culture." -- Nicole Eustace, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Covered with Night
"Wild Girls invites readers on a crucial journey of insight and humanity, reminding us how each life—whether enslaved or dispossessed, marginalized or privileged—takes place on this Earth.  In centering the formative ties with nature of remarkable girls-to-women—Harriet Tubman, Zitkála-Šá, and Louisa May Alcott among them—Tiya Miles shows how all claimed “wild” as elemental to their lives and their power to oppose racism and sexism. This reckoning with their pasts illuminates possibilities for our future." -- Lauret Savoy, author of Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
"How did women, especially African-American and Indigenous women in the US, find freedom in the face of slavery, repression, domesticity, assimilation, trauma and fear? Through incredible storytelling and study, Miles uncovers how girls and women learned n" -- Brenda Child, author of My Grandfather's Knocking Sticks
"These stories are a call to action, a reminder that if we lose our way, Nature is a bridge. I, for one, am rejuvenated. What a gift." -- Carolyn Finney, author of Black Faces, White Spaces
"Tiya Miles' 'Wild Girls' is a thoroughly absorbing exploration of the formative role that nature has played in American women's lives. A beautiful synthesis of diverse women's experiences, combining history with memoir and a call to action, this brisk, elegant study — the first in a new series of "short" nonfiction books from Norton — demonstrates how the natural world functioned as a girlhood training ground for adult resistance to the country's confining gender roles." -- Jill Watts - The New York Times Book Review