The Queen of Bohemia Looks Forward to Meeting You!

The Occasion: The publication of author Eve Kahn’s (pictured above) Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death a biography of Lower East Side activist journalist and party person Zoe Anderson Norris (1860-1914)

The Event: There will be cocktails, mocktails, signed books, tiaras, music by DJ Pepe Flores, a presentation of Zoe Anderson Norris’s life and works and an extraordinary panel of contemporary “Queens of Bohemia” in conversation with Eve Kahn.

The Topic: If the Past is Prologue (yes, talking about you Zoe) what will we do about the Future?

La Sala de Pepe y Foto Espacio & Loisaida Inc. in partnership with The Village Trip invite you to a celebration of the Life, the Death, and the ‘Resurrection’ of Zoe Anderson Norris, Lower East Side resident, “muckraking” journalist, publisher of The East Side “magazinelet”, poet, clairvoyant, social justice activist on behalf of the poor and the immigrant, and founder/head hostess of The Ragged Edge Klub, a space where ‘artists, authors, aviators, composers, dancers, musicians, physicians, politicians, singers, theater producers’ and others, living on the “ragged edges” of society themselves, could defy the rules and hierarchies of the Gilded Age.

Here was a Klub whose meetings were held in Lower East Side and East Village restaurants where anyone who shared Zoe’s radical social values, and could afford a 98-cent dinner, would eat, drink and dance the night away!

So well-known was Zoe as a foe of income inequality and social hypocrisy that her death in 1914 made the National News. Over 230 papers in the US and Canada ran obits and columns. How is it that today so few of us have heard of Zoe Anderson Norris? Was it because her contemporaries, such as Jacob Riis, Ida B. Wells and Emma Goldman, were better connected and provided more colorful media material? Was it because she was a woman and loud-mouthed feminist? Or because much of her popular fiction writing was thinly veiled and often “catty” commentary on her family, friends, and enemies? Or simply because Zoe, born and raised in Kentucky, based for a decade in Kansas, married more than once, and a traveler in Europe before settling in the Lower East Side, was a tremendously complex woman?

Today we might call Zoe Anderson Norris an anarchist, an influencer, a social justice activist and even a performance artist. But definitely no longer forgotten, thanks to the historical researcher and author Eve Kahn.

Books will be available for purchase and signing at the party.