We are proud to share that the news that Columbia Journalism School alumnus
Robert W. Fieseler, a 2013 graduate of the
Part-Time Master of Science Program, has been named the 2019
Journalist of the Year by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA). Additionally, Fieseler received the NLGJA's Excellence in Book Writing Award for
Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation (Liveright/W.W. Norton).
Tinderbox chronicles the tragic act of arson that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman at the Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans on June 24, 1973 and became a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement.
At Columbia, Fieseler made the connections that led to the creation of
Tinderbox. As a student, Fieseler took Professor
Samuel Freedman's legendary
Book Writing class. After Fieseler graduated from Columbia as co-valedictorian and winner of a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship and the Lynton Fellowship in Book Writing, Freedman
recommended him to Liveright editor Robert Weil, who was looking for someone to write a book about the Up Stairs Lounge fire.
In addition to receiving the NLGJA book award,
Tinderbox won the 2019 Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime and the 2019 Lambda Literary Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers. The book was also a finalist for the 2019 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction and was a 2019 American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book and Over the Rainbow selection. “This vital book chronicles one of the worst outrages against gay people in modern America, and it does so with fantastic vividness," wrote
Noonday Demon author Andrew Solomon. "It restores a forgotten chapter of horror to our national narrative of rights. Robert W. Fieseler reminds us how deep prejudice was, not only on the part of the man who set the fire at the Up Stairs Lounge, but also in the media that ignored the story and the population that took no interest in it.”
Fieseler is currently based in Boston and New Orleans. His essays and feature stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and recognized in roundups of best nonfiction by
The Atlantic.
NLGJA’s Excellence in Journalism Awards were established in 1993 to foster, recognize and reward excellence in journalism on issues related to the LGBTQ community. In recent years, the program was expanded to more than 30 categories.
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