HISTORY IS MY MUSE: FINDING PRESENT INSPIRATION IN THE PAST

History is a gold mine for the discerning writer, prospecting for nuggets from the distant—or recent—past in archives and the historical record. Fordham University professor Edward Cahill takes us back to the pre-Stonewall era in Disorderly Men, a story of a police raid on a gay bar and its complicated consequences. Julia Malye tells a tale of resourceful women, “volunteers” shipped from France to the Louisiana Territory, in Pelican Girls. Louisiana State University professor and author Maurice Carlos Ruffin imagines what his female ancestors would have done to resist the Confederacy in the antebellum era in The American Daughters. Wendy Chin-Tanner draws on her father’s experience as a patient in what was then known as the leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, for her first novel, King of the Armadillos. And Colm Toíbín has crafted many novels—Brooklyn and the forthcoming Long Island among them—from the rich history of Ireland and New York. Miles Harvey, author of The King of Confidence moderates.

 

 

 

 

03/23/2024 2:30pm-3:45pm , Hotel Monteleone, Queen Anne Ballroom, $10 or LitPass or VIP Pass.

$10.00

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