Buffalo Literature: History, storytelling come together in novel
Buffalo-based author Rosanne Higgins is both a scholar and a novelist. In graduate school, she studied the relationship between biology and poverty, with a focus on the institutionalized poor.
An invitation to join the Erie County Poorhouse Cemetery project by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Buffalo led her to fiction writing. Trying to piece together the deaths of poorhouse inmates, she became interested in telling their stories in an accessible way beyond academia. This led to her first novel, Orphans and Inmates, which is a fictional account of poorhouse residents backed by historical facts. This was followed by seven other novels mixing history with spiritualism and a touch of magic.
Today we talk to Higgins about her latest novel, A Time Against Race, which explores the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Buffalo in the 1920s.
PAK…