March 25, 1911 is called the day a fire changed America. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City is considered the city's worst industrial disaster and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire took the lives of 146 garment workers, many Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls, who couldn't escape the burning building because the boss men locked the doors to the stairwells and exits. Others jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors to their deaths. The fire led to the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and laws requiring better factory safety standards. If you want to read more, Leon Stein's book The Triangle Fire is out in a new centennial edition. 

For more info, check out the website Remember The Triangle Fire, The Huffington Post's Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Book List, Cornell University's Kheel Center, and The Triangle Fire, a documentary film by Roy Campolongo.

There were many events this centennial year. In New York, I was part of an Italian American Writers Association (IAWA) Triangle Fire Literary Reading at the SEIU's Bread and Roses Gallery in Manhattan. Thanks to IAWA poet Maria Lisella for organizing.

Here are links to Annie Lanzillotto and LuLu LoLo, two amazing Italian American performance artists whose work you must have the good fortune to get acquainted with if you haven't already at a centennial event.

My Triangle fire and sweatshop poems have been published in literary journals such as Feminist Studies and will appear in my forthcoming collection Once I Heard the Air Was Not for Breathing due out next year. "Girl Talk" was excerpted in the book Teaching Italian-American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture edited by Edvige Giunta and Kathleen Zamboni McCormick.