Authors: Jane Carr and Lori Harrison Kahan

This recording is presented by Princeton Public Library. Editors Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan, in conversation with Valerie Popp, discuss "The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings," a comprehensive collection of writings by Elizabeth Garver Jordan.
About the book:
"The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings" is the first to collect Garver Jordan’s fiction and journalism, much of which has been out of print for over a century. Jordan began her career as a reporter, making her name as one of few women journalists to cover the Lizzie Borden murder trial for the New York World in 1893. Jordan’s distinctive, narrative-driven coverage of the Borden and other high-profile murder cases brought her national visibility, and she turned increasingly to fiction writing. Drawing on her experiences as a true-crime reporter and newspaper editor, she published detective novels and short story collections such as "Tales of the City Room" that explored the fine line between women’s criminality and crimes against women. Employing popular genre conventions as a means of dealing with women’s issues, Jordan exposed gendered abuse in the workplace and the prevalence of sexual violence. "The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings" encourages readers to draw a historical trajectory from Jordan’s pioneering literary activism to the writings of contemporary journalists and novelists whose work continues to fuel discussions of gender, feminism, and crime, raising questions about who gets to tell women’s stories, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
In Conversation:
Jane Greenway Carr is a senior editor with CNN Opinion whose work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Slate and Vox among other publications. She was previously a contributing editor and fellow at the think tank New America and a lecturer in the English Department at New York University. She is the co-editor of “The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings: Tales of a Newspaper Woman.”
Lori Harrison-Kahan is a professor in the English Department at Boston College and has received multiple awards for recovering forgotten literary works by women. In addition to co-editing "The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings" with Jane Carr, she is the editor of "The Superwoman and Other Writings" by Miriam Michelson, co-editor of "Heirs of Yesterday" by Emma Wolf, co-editor of "Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History" and author of "The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary." Harrison-Kahan graduated from Princeton University and earned a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
Valerie Popp is a public humanities expert, scholar, teacher, and program designer. She currently works as the Director of Programs and Sustainability for Journalism + Design at The New School in New York City, where she develops, funds, and manages cohort-based initiatives that center community colleges and other higher education institutions as hubs for local news. Prior to joining J+D in 2024, Popp held senior program officer roles at the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. A proud first-generation college graduate, she has a B.A. in English literature from Yale University and a M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her scholarship on modernist and contemporary American and British literature has appeared in Contemporary Literature, African American Review, and Wasafiri, among other places.
This event was recorded on September 29, 2024.