Join us for a presentation on March 29, 2026 at 4PM of Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, with coeditor Edvige Giunta and contributors Paola Corso and Jacqueline Ellis. In addition, NJCU student and historian-in-training Sophia Burns will talk about Hoboken resident Vincenza Billota, a sixteen-year-old worker who died in the Triangle fire.

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York. The top three floors housed the Triangle Waist Company, a factory where approximately 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women and girls, labored to produce fashionable cotton blouses, known as “waists.” The fire killed 146 workers in a mere 15 minutes but pierced the perpetual conscience of citizens everywhere. The Asch Building had been considered a modern fireproof structure, but inadequate fire safety regulations left the workers inside unprotected. The tragedy of the fire, and the resulting movements for change, were pivotal in shaping workers’ rights and unions.

A powerful collection of diverse voices, Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire (New Village Press, 2022) brings together stories from writers, artists, activists, scholars, and family members of the Triangle workers. Nineteen contributors from across the globe speak of a singular event with remarkable impact. One hundred and fifteen years after the tragedy, Talking to the Girls articulates a story of contemporary global relevance and stands as an act of collective testimony: a written memorial to the Triangle victims. Talking to the Girls received the 2023 Susan Koppelman Award for Best Anthology in Feminist Studies and American Popular Culture. In 2025, the Italian translation by Paola Bono, le ragaszze della Triangle, was published by Iacobelli.

PRESENTERS

Sophia Burns is a fourth-year undergraduate history student at New Jersey City University in Jersey City, New Jersey. She has given presentations at annual conferences of the American Historical Association and Phi Alpha Theta. In 2025, she received NJCU’s annual Kathy Potter Memorial Writing Award. Her article “‘Organize Everything That Works’: An Analysis of Two Early Twentieth Century Strikes in Bayonne, New Jersey” was published in the Summer 2025 issue of New Jersey Studies. Her primary research interests include labor history, immigration history, and the history of the New York metropolitan area.

Paola Corso, a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow and Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award Winner, is the author of eight books of poetry and fiction set in her native Pittsburgh where her Southern Italian immigrant family members worked in steel mills. Her recent books include Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps, The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the Tillie Olsen Award in Creative Writing;, and Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing, a 2018 Triangle Fire Memorial Association Awardee as well as her essay, “Girl Talk” in the anthology, Talking To the Girls. Her latest, Oxygen for Two, will be published by Bordighera Press this year.  www.paolajocorso.com

Jacqueline Ellis is a Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at NJCU. She is the author of Silent Witnesses: Representations of Working-Class Women in the United States (U of Wisconsin Press, 1998) and of several articles that focus on intersections of gender, social class, work, and popular culture. Her creative writing has been published in The Normal School, Hinterland Magazine, and Zone 3 among others. In 2023, her essay “The Vast Distance Away from Everything” was nominated for Best of the Net and for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently working on a creative nonfiction book titled Scottish Murder Ballad.

Edvige Giunta is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and co-editor of several anthologies, including The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture and Talking to the Girls. Her memoirs, essays, and poetry have appeared in journals, magazines, and anthologies in the US and Italy. At New Jersey City University, where she is Professor of English, she has trained scores of students in the art of memoir and teaches a course on the Triangle fire she developed. The recipient of a Triangle Fire Memorial Association Award, she has been profiled by RAI as well as The New York Times and other publications. She has taught memoir workshop for communities in the US and Italy. www.edvigegiunta.com

Admission is free.