Above / Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation receives Edward Award for Robert W. Fieseler.
PN UPDATE, June 5, 2019 / “I just wanted to give you a heads up that I’ll be having my paperback book launch at Anderson’s in Naperville at 7PM on Tues., June 18, https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/event/robert-fieseler-0.” writes Bobby Feiseler. “The esteemed Bryan Ogg, your columnist, will be interviewing me at the event, and I’m so honored to have his support.”
PN UPDATE, May 23, 2019 / Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation by Robert W. Fieseler is now in paperback. Fieseler will return to Anderson’s Bookshop in downtown Naperville to sign copies of his award-winning non-fiction work at 7PM on Tues., June 18, 2019.
PN UPDATE, April 26, 2019 / Upon receipt of this exciting news about a young writer we first met years ago during an interview at Heaven on Seven, we contacted Bobby Fieseler with our congratulations last night. Here’s his reply that arrived this morning:
“What an overwhelmingly fantastic culmination of a five-year journey that took me from researching and reporting in New Orleans to banging out a book proposal for my future publisher in Nichols Library to completing the final manuscript at my parents’ house,” said Fiesler. “I couldn’t have done this without the support of my family, especially my mom and dad Mary Ellen and Bob Fieseler, and my hometown community, especially the folks at Anderson’s who hosted my book launch last summer! I’m very lucky.”
New York, NY, April 25, 2019 / Mystery Writers of America is proud to announce Robert W. Fieseler is among the winners for the 2019 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2018. The Edgar® Awards were presented to 15 winners at during the 73rd Gala Banquet, held on April 25, 2019, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York City.
First-time work wins Edward Award for Best Fact Crime
Fieseler won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime for his book Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation (WW.Norton & Company – Liveright).
An essential work of American civil rights history, Tinderbox mesmerizingly reconstructs the 1973 fire that devastated New Orleans’ subterranean gay community. Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016.
Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue-collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community. Yet the impassioned activism that followed proved essential to the emergence of a fledgling gay movement. Tinderbox restores honor to a forgotten generation of civil-rights martyrs.
Robert W. Fieseler
Fieseler is the acclaimed debut author of Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, which was listed as a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal and named an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book.
Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is a recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. Raised in Naperville, he now lives with his husband in Boston and New Orleans.
Story and photos submitted by Kathy Daneman, Mystery Writers of America, National Headquarters, New York, NY.
