Featured writer: Steve Watkins; Moderator: Rosemary Feurer
The true story of America’s largest labor uprising, told for younger audiences, is the centerpiece of this discussion of writing about labor.
Book signing times (all signings take place in the Winter Garden, 9th Floor)
🖊️Steve Watkins: 12:30 – 12:50
FULL SCHEDULE
About the writers:
ROSEMARY FEURER’S research and teaching interests focus on understanding the political economy of social conflict. She focuses on labor movements and conflict within the context of U.S. capitalist development spatially, socially and economically during the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Her new work follows the story that made for violent conflict in Illinois and also helped to make it the strongest unionized state in the nation, tentatively entitled The Illinois Mine Wars, 1860-1930. It covers the epic conflicts that helped to define Illinois as one of the strongest labor states in the nation. She is also working on a new biography of Mother Jones, the renowned labor activist and agitator of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. She has always connected her research to public history projects, including tours, electronic media, oral history and video production. Feurer is the author of Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism and Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950.
STEVE WATKINS is an award-winning author of twelve books for young readers, including Down Sand Mountain, which won the 2009 Golden Kite Award for young adult fiction. He also writes books for grown-ups, and won a Pushcart Prize for one of the stories in his collection My Chaos Theory. He is co-editor of the online ideas and features magazine Pie & Chai, a former English professor at the University of Mary Washington, a longtime yoga instructor, and father of four daughters. He and his family live in Fredericksburg, VA.
Books by these writers:
VIEW FESTIVAL READING LIST
Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism edited by Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson
Highlights the tenacious efforts by employers to organize themselves as a class to contest labor.
The Mine Wars: The Bloody Fight for Workers’ Rights in the West Virginia Coalfields by Steve Watkins
In this gripping narrative nonfiction book, meet the resolute and spirited people who fought for the rights of coal miners, and discover how the West Virginia Mine Wars paved the way for vital worker protections nationwide.
