Wednesday, March 29, at 6:30pm via Zoom, Register Below Presented by Eve M. Kahn Join LESPI and Eve M. Kahn for a fascinating Zoom talk on “To Fight for the Poor with My Pen: Zoe Anderson Norris, Queen of Bohemia.” Norris (1860-1914) was a foremother of modern-day social-justice advocates and confessional bloggers baring souls in print. In millions of published words of fiction and journalism - including in her own bimonthly magazine, The East Side (1909-1914) - she documented desperate immigrant poverty from her "literary sanctum" on East 15th Street and called for the world to heed and help. Much of the material in Norris’s The East Side relates to extant buildings on the Lower East Side, ranging from tenements where Zoe interviewed the families of Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire victims to the charity hospital where she died after mailing out an issue predicting her own death. Eve Kahn's current exhibition at the Grolier Club features the only complete run of The East Side known to survive in private hands, as well as Norris' novels, periodicals featuring Norris' work alongside major Gilded Age artists, and a fascinating collection of artifacts. The exhibit runs until May 13. Kahn, a former weekly Antiques columnist for The New York Times, is finishing a biography of Norris for an academic press. |
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