Who Owns History? Making Fiction from the Facts of the Triangle
Fire of 1911. Do we accept all the documents and do we listen
equally to all the voices that come to us in myriad forms that make
up any historic record? Or are we convinced that there are always
discrepancies that reveal the possibility of hidden stories to
explore? The Triangle fire is one of the most terrible tragedies in
American history. Examining it through this fictional lens can
force us to consider how we tell our stories, how we hear them and
how history is forged from unverifiable truths.
Date
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Time
7:00 p.m.
Location
Carnesecca Arena, Queens campus
About the Speaker and her works
Katharine Weber’s fiction debut in print, the short story
“Friend of the Family,” appeared in The New Yorker in
January 1993. Her firs novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than
They Appear (of which that story was a chapter), was published
by Crown Publishers, Inc., in 1995 and was published in paperback
by PicadorUSA in 1996. She was named by Granta to the controversial
list of 50 Best Young American Novelists in 1996. Her second novel,
The Music Lesson, was published by Crown Publishers, Inc.
in 1999, and was published in paperback by PicadorUSA in 2000.
The Music Lesson has been published in 12 foreign
languages. The Little Women was published by Farrar,
Straus & Giroux in 2003 and by Picador in 2004. All three
novels were named Notable Books by The New York Times Book
Review. Katharine’s fourth novel, Triangle, which
takes up the notorious Triangle Waist Company factory fire of 1911,
was published in 2006 by Farra, Straus & Giroux, and in 2007 by
Picador.
Katharine was born in New York City in 1955. She grew up in
Forest Hills Gardens and attended P.S.101, The Kew-Forest School,
and Forest Hills High School, which she left after 11th grade in
order to attend the inaugural year of the Freshman Year Program at
The New School for Social Research (now Lang College at New School
University) in 1972. Before publishing fiction, Katharine
wrote numerous book reviews, essays and literary profiles for a
range of publications, as well as a weekly newspaper column in the
Sunday New Haven Register for two years. A thesis advisor
for the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts, Katharine
taught fiction writing at Yale University for eight years, and was
the Kratz Writer in Residence at Goucher College in 2006. She is
married and has two daughters, now in their twenties.
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