Guest speaker: Katherine Vaz
An Immigration Story: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE PORTUGUESE PROTESTANTS OF ILLINOIS
Katherine Vaz will share the little-known immigration story at the heart of her recent novel, ABOVE THE SALT (Flatiron/Macmillan, 2023)
Vaz, the first Portuguese American to have her work recorded for the Archives of the Library of Congress (Hispanic Division), is a former Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard and a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute. She'll share her discoveries about the Madeiran refugees who were adopted by Illinois during the time of Lincoln, and her talk will delve into the social experiment that amounted to a war for the spirit of the country at the time. Her novel, ABOVE THE SALT, was a People Magazine Book of the Week, a Top 15 from Good Morning, America, and a Top November Pick from Goodreads.
Her other books include SAUDADE, MARIANA (in six languages), and the collections FADO & OTHER STORIES (Drue Heinz Literature Prize) and OUR LADY OF THE ARTICHOKES (Prairie Schooner Book Award). She is a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship Recipient and was on the six-person Presidential Delegation to represent the U.S. at the World's Fair/Expo 98 in Lisbon.
