Featuring Down Under By Karen Tintori
Twenty-eight leading voices in fiction - Including eleven New York Times Bestselling Authors - join together In a celebration of great storytelling. We ...
By Jillian Karr (pseudonym of Karen Tintori and Jill Gregory)
Miss America has vanished and photographer Cat Hansen refuses to sit and wait for someone to find her missing sister. Charging ...
By Karen Tintori
Featuring two accounts by Karen Tintori, this latest book from Casa Italia is an anthology about the Italian American experience as seen through the eyes of women. The first ...
By Karen Tintori and Jill Gregory -- originally published under the pseudonym Jillian Karr
Four glamorous women. Four perfect brides. Four deadly secrets. When Perfect Bride magazine editor ...
By Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori
David Shepherd knows the names of the thirty-six Righteous Souls, upon whose existence -- the Talmud says -- God keeps the world in existence. Thirty-three of ...
By Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori
Museum curator Natalie Landau fights to learn who murdered her reporter sister in Iraq -- and battles powerful forces pursuing the mysterious gift her sister ...
By Karen Tintori
One of the Chicago Tribune's Favorite Books of 2002, Trapped is the story of the worst coal mine fire in U.S. history, and still stands as that country's third worst coal mine ...
By Karen Tintori
Unto the Daughters is the story of a secret guarded so fiercely for nine decades that members of Tintori’s family died without ever learning of it. Unto the Daughters began ...
By Rabbi E.B. Freedman, Jan Greenberg and Karen A. Katz
Is everything in the Bible true? Why are there bad people in the world? Can't God stop them? Why do I need to learn to read, write, and ...
Scholastic Magazine Highlights The Cherry Mine Disaster
Scholastic Magazine brought the 1090 Cherry Mine disaster to the attention of middle grade students in the United States with a full-color cover story in its November, 2019, issue. Highlighting the prevalence of child labor in 1909, Scholastic painted the grim picture of children's daily lives early in the last century via the story of the United State's worst coal mine disaster. School was not an option for children born into poor families, nor from immigrant families who crossed the ocean to work in U.S. coal mines. Every nickel and dime earned by these young boys was desperately needed for daily survival. So parents falsified ages on job applications while mine company bosses looked the other way, and children sat for hours in complete darkness -- tasked with the boring duty of waiting to open and close tunnel doors to permit mule teams to pull full coal cars to the elevator shaft and then rush the empties back to the miners to refill.
Among the major legal changes resulting from the Cherry Mine disaster was the adoption of stricter national child labor laws.
Seven months after the disaster, the St. Paul Coal Company, which operated the mine at Cherry, pled guilty to nine counts of child labor law violations -- and was fined a total of $630.
If you are a teacher who discussed the Cherry Mine disaster with your students as a result of Scholastic's feature coverage, I would love to hear the children's feedback.
Lovely Lady Dark of Hue Published in Ovunque Siamo
When I was a child, May was the month of bright yellow forsythia, fuzzy fat pussy willow, and the May altars my classmates and I concocted from shoe boxes disguised with tinfoil and adorned with doilies, flowers real and artificial, and glow-in-the-dark or dashboard-sized statues of the Virgin Mary. The time of First Holy Communions and, ultimately, the pageant to crown Mary's statue at the side altar of church, May was probably the month when I first learned "Lovely Lady Dressed in Blue" by Mary Dixon Thayer, a poem/prayer I memorized in grade school.
This May, I am thrilled to share the current issue of Ovunque Siamo, the online journal of New Italian-American Writing edited by Michelle Messina Reale, in which my Madonne Nere inspired riff on Thayer's poem appears.
Here is a taste of my LOVELY LADY, DARK OF HUE,:
Lovely Lady, dark of hue,
Teach me how to pray.
A god was born your little boy,
Tell me what to say
When you sat him, as he grew,
Gently on your knee
Did you sing to him the way
My mother sang to me?
Did he hold your hand at night?
Did you ever cry
Telling him stories of the world?
Ah! Then did he pry
The deepest secrets from your soul —
The name of every herb,
Of every sacred flower
You sowed to save the earth?
Lovely lady, darkly hewn
From an ancient tree....
Intrigued? Please click on the following links to read LOVELY LADY, DARK OF HUE in it's entirety, and the spectacular May, 2019, issue of Ovunque Siamo.
Listen in as Karen Discusseses Honor on BackStory
Backstory's examination of honor throughout history includes an interview segment about my great-aunt Frances's story, told in Unto The Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian-American Family.
While much has been written about male honor -- as settled in duels, on the battlefield, etc. -- not much has been written about female honor. Typically, a female's honor is intrinsically bound up in the honor of her father, husband, brothers, and still is the impetus for honor killings in many corners of the world.
Listen in as I discuss the many facets of honor at play in the story of my great-aunt's murder with Joanne Freeman, Yale professor of history and American studies.
Backstory is a weekly podcast that uses current events in the United States to take a deep dive into the American past. Hosted by noted U.S. historians, BackStory is made possible through the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and has ranked in the Top 10 of the iTunes Society and Culture list and as high as #10 among all iTunes podcasts.
The full podcast can be accessed at the Backstory website here.
Julia Buccola Petta -- Solving the Mystery of Chicago's Ghost Bride
When Dominic Candeloro asked me to contribute a study of an Italian woman from Chicago to Casa Italia's new anthology, Italian Women in Chicago, my immediate thought was "Frances Cabrini." Just as quickly, I dismissed the Italian-born saint from consideration, certain that another contributor had surely claimed her. I began searching the internet for a little-known Italian woman with a Chicago connection and stumbled upon the mystery of the ghost bride, Julia Buccola Petta, who died in childbirth and who haunts Chicago's Mt. Carmel Cemetery. With a little genealogical research and a bit of sleuthing, I was able to resolve the mystery of her stillborn child. Later, to my surprise, Dominic Candeloro invited me to contribute a second piece to the anthology--one about Mother Frances Cabrini.
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