Karen Tintori
Encyclopedia
Karen Tintori is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. Her books cover a wide range of human experience, from the mysteries of the Kabbalah
to the lives of Italian American
immigrants. She writes both as a solo author and in collaboration with New York Times best-selling author Jill Gregory.
. Her father, Raymond, a World War II
veteran and Michigan State University
graduate, had married a Sicilian American named Joanne two years earlier against the advice of his first-generation Italian American mother. When she was six weeks old, the new family moved out of their trailer and headed west to Detroit. Tintori was raised in the 1950s and early 1960s, the oldest of three children in a close-knit working-class neighborhood near the predominantly Polish enclave of Hamtramck.
Caught between the values of the old world and a post-war society teeming with change, Tintori’s early life was both simple and conflicted. While she fully embraced her Italian heritage, she questioned some of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Her liberal parents encouraged her to be inquisitive and fulfill her potential but to be aware that she still lived in a world of limitations.
of a class of 36 at St. Augustine High School to Detroit’s Wayne State University
in the mid ‘60s as life changing:
Tintori majored in journalism and became a stringer for The New York Times
. She joined the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian
, as a staff writer just before New Leftists gained control of the paper in 1967 and changed its name to The South End. While other reporters jumped ship, she stayed on, continuing to write stories free of the political dogma that pervaded the rest of its content. There, she met and started dating another reporter and future law student, Lawrence Katz, who would later become her husband.
Tintori was acquiring an identity. These new people and new ideas changed her dramatically, but she was not a rebel. While she was seriously contemplating conversion to Judaism
, she wanted her parents’ understanding if not approval. While she shared the tenets of the new feminism, she looked forward to competing in the two traditional Italian beauty contests scheduled for 1968, her sophomore year. That year, she became Miss Detroit Fruit Vendors’ Association and Miss Columbus Day.
Tintori earned an undergraduate degree in journalism from W.S.U. in 1970.
With her parents’ support, Tintori was converted by a bet din – a legal court of three rabbis – at an Orthodox mikveh at the age of 24.
At a mother-toddler class in 1981, she met another young mother, Jill Gregory, already a best-selling romance novelist. As their children, Mitchel and Rachel, struck up a friendship, so did Tintori and Gregory.
Unlike other team efforts, Tintori and Gregory did not divide up or delegate tasks. Instead, they developed their thoughts and wrote in a single style, sitting side-by-side. This ability to write together, in one voice, has characterized their entire body of work since. Both writers have publicly discussed their writing methodology and the ability of each to anticipate the other’s thoughts and even complete her sentences.
The success of their first collaborative effort spurred them on to the next. In 1993, under the pseudonym Jillian Karr (a combination of Jill and Karen), they published Something Borrowed, Something Blue (Doubleday, Bantam Books
). The novel - a story of intrigue involving four brides-to-be with secrets - was excerpted by Cosmopolitan Magazine and released as a made-for-TV movie starring Connie Sellecca
, Twiggy
and Ken Howard
.
In 1996, again writing as Jillian Karr, the writing team published Catch Me If You Can (Avon Books), a suspense novel about a kidnapped Miss America
.
Both Jillian Karr books were published in hardcover and paperback editions and in multiple languages.
Having been told that her paternal grandfather had survived the Cherry Mine disaster, the worst mine fire in the history of the United States, Tintori began an exploration into the disaster that took the lives of 259 men and boys deep inside an Illinois coal mine. The result was Trapped: The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster (Atria Books, 2002). The book explores the senseless way the fire began, the failed efforts to rescue those down below, the heroism both above and below ground, and the impact it had on the lives of those involved. Increasingly interested in her family genealogy and heritage, she recounts the experiences of immigrants, including her own relatives, who had recently come from countries throughout Europe - particularly Italy - seeking success and finding only suffering and death in that mine. After its hardcover release, the book was published in paperback.
Trapped has been optioned for film.
In 2007, she returned to the world of fiction, again collaborating with her writing partner. Now writing as Karen Tintori and Jill Gregory, the duo published The Book of Names (St. Martin’s Press). The book is a thriller based on the actual principles of the Kabbalah, which teaches that the world’s existence requires that it be occupied by 36 righteous souls, called Lamed vovniks, or Tzadikim Nistarim
in Hebrew.
The novel begins with 33 of them murdered and the start of a race to keep them alive. The book has been published worldwide and translated into 20 languages. In particular, it is a best-seller in Germany, where websites and contests have been created about the book, with prizes including a trip to England.
The book is published in hardcover, paperback, audio and electronic formats.
Later that same year, Tintori revealed her own family’s secret history – buried for 80 years out of guilt and shame – when she published Unto The Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing
in a Sicilian-American Family (St. Martin’s Press). The book is a narrative nonfiction about the murder of her great aunt, Frances Costa, in a Sicilian honor killing in Detroit 1919. Tintori has explained that she wrote the book to give Aunt Frances back her name and identity, to expose the ugly customs and traditions of honor for honor’s sake, and to restore dignity to the new generations of women who followed. In that sense, Unto The Daughters is not only an account of the legacy of Sicilian culture but an intensely personal family memoir.
The book has been published in hardcover and paperback.
Both Trapped and Unto The Daughters were taught in an Italian-American studies class at The Harvard University Extension School in the Spring of 2008.
Tintori will be returning to her collaboration with Gregory in 2008 when St. Martin’s Press releases the novel, The Illumination, another spiritual thriller. The book will also be simultaneously published in Germany.
Tintori is a member of International Thriller Writers and Novelists Inc.
She and her husband are members of the Italian American Cultural Society.
• Something Borrowed, Something Blue by Jillian Karr, Doubleday 1993; Bantam Books 1994
• Catch Me If You Can by Jillian Karr, Avon 1996
• Trapped: The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster by Karen Tintori, Atria 2002; Washington Square Press 2003
• The Book of Names by Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori, St. Martin’s Press 2007
• Unto The Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian-American Family by Karen Tintori, St. Martin’s Press 2007
• The Illumination by Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori, St. Martin's Press (scheduled for 2008)
Kabbalah
Kabbalah/Kabala is a discipline and school of thought concerned with the esoteric aspect of Rabbinic Judaism. It was systematized in 11th-13th century Hachmei Provence and Spain, and again after the Expulsion from Spain, in 16th century Ottoman Palestine...
to the lives of Italian American
Italian American
An Italian American , is an American of Italian ancestry. The designation may also refer to someone possessing Italian and American dual citizenship...
immigrants. She writes both as a solo author and in collaboration with New York Times best-selling author Jill Gregory.
Early life
Tintori was born East Lansing, MichiganMichigan
Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....
. Her father, Raymond, a World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
veteran and Michigan State University
Michigan State University
Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...
graduate, had married a Sicilian American named Joanne two years earlier against the advice of his first-generation Italian American mother. When she was six weeks old, the new family moved out of their trailer and headed west to Detroit. Tintori was raised in the 1950s and early 1960s, the oldest of three children in a close-knit working-class neighborhood near the predominantly Polish enclave of Hamtramck.
Caught between the values of the old world and a post-war society teeming with change, Tintori’s early life was both simple and conflicted. While she fully embraced her Italian heritage, she questioned some of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Her liberal parents encouraged her to be inquisitive and fulfill her potential but to be aware that she still lived in a world of limitations.
Education
Tintori was among that first generation of “liberated” women eouraged to obtain a college education. She has described her transition from salutatorianSalutatorian
Salutatorian is an academic title given, in the United States and Canada, to the second highest graduate of the entire graduating class of a specific discipline. Only the valedictorian is ranked higher. This honor is traditionally based on grade point average and number of credits taken, but...
of a class of 36 at St. Augustine High School to Detroit’s Wayne State University
Wayne State University
Wayne State University is a public research university located in Detroit, Michigan, United States, in the city's Midtown Cultural Center Historic District. Founded in 1868, WSU consists of 13 schools and colleges offering more than 400 major subject areas to over 32,000 graduate and...
in the mid ‘60s as life changing:
I hadn’t burned my bra, but I didn’t wear it, either. The same mother who held me back from wearing nylons, heels, and my first training bra pretended not to notice. Flower children were in bloom, women friends at college were living in communes or marrying without discarding their surnames. Feminism was a far cry from my grandmother’s and mother’s paths, but hadn’t Mama planted its germs in me when she ordered me never to pretend I wasn’t as bright as a boy? --Unto The Daughters
Tintori majored in journalism and became a stringer for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
. She joined the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian
The Daily Collegian
The Daily Collegian may refer to:* The Daily Collegian , a student-operated newspaper at the University of Massachusetts Amherst* The Daily Collegian , a student-operated newspaper at the Pennsylvania State University...
, as a staff writer just before New Leftists gained control of the paper in 1967 and changed its name to The South End. While other reporters jumped ship, she stayed on, continuing to write stories free of the political dogma that pervaded the rest of its content. There, she met and started dating another reporter and future law student, Lawrence Katz, who would later become her husband.
Tintori was acquiring an identity. These new people and new ideas changed her dramatically, but she was not a rebel. While she was seriously contemplating conversion to Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
, she wanted her parents’ understanding if not approval. While she shared the tenets of the new feminism, she looked forward to competing in the two traditional Italian beauty contests scheduled for 1968, her sophomore year. That year, she became Miss Detroit Fruit Vendors’ Association and Miss Columbus Day.
Tintori earned an undergraduate degree in journalism from W.S.U. in 1970.
Conversion to Judaism
A year after her graduation, Tintori began religious conversion classes. The day had finally arrived to tell her parents:
The tears streamed faster as I thought about their sacrifices to send me to Catholic school, about the Jewish tailor, the boss my father credited with giving him a moral upbringing during the five Depression years he spent in his employ. I thought about my long dissatisfaction with Catholicism and about all that I had found in common with my Jewish friends. --Unto The Daughters
With her parents’ support, Tintori was converted by a bet din – a legal court of three rabbis – at an Orthodox mikveh at the age of 24.
Marriage and Family Life
In 1972, she was married by a Conservative rabbi to Lawrence Katz. The early years of their marriage were spent establishing professional careers and traveling. In 1979, Tintori gave birth to the couple’s first son, Mitchel, and in 1982, to their second, Steven. The couple still lives in the same home in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where they raised their now-grown children.At a mother-toddler class in 1981, she met another young mother, Jill Gregory, already a best-selling romance novelist. As their children, Mitchel and Rachel, struck up a friendship, so did Tintori and Gregory.
Early Professional Career
At the urging of her father, Tintori eschewed news journalism for a career in marketing and public relations. She worked for an advertising agency and then a flowers-by-wire organization, as an assistant editor of its monthly magazine, and for a professional organization associated with the automobile industry. In the years before the birth of her first son, she was a marketing officer for a financial institution. When Mitchel was born, she quit to raise him on a full-time basis and never returned to corporate life.Writing career
Tintori’s friendship with Jill Gregory quickly developed into a professional relationship. After trying to figure out a sensitive way to answer their children's questions about life and death, Tintori and Gregory decided to write a book designed to answer a wide range of questions children ask about God. The result was What Does Being Jewish Mean?, in conjunction with Rabbi E.B Freedman, published by Simon and Schuster in 1991. The book has been reprinted 11 times and used by children and adults, Jews and non-Jews alike, as a primer on the basic concepts and principles of Judaism.Unlike other team efforts, Tintori and Gregory did not divide up or delegate tasks. Instead, they developed their thoughts and wrote in a single style, sitting side-by-side. This ability to write together, in one voice, has characterized their entire body of work since. Both writers have publicly discussed their writing methodology and the ability of each to anticipate the other’s thoughts and even complete her sentences.
The success of their first collaborative effort spurred them on to the next. In 1993, under the pseudonym Jillian Karr (a combination of Jill and Karen), they published Something Borrowed, Something Blue (Doubleday, Bantam Books
Bantam Books
Bantam Books is an American publishing house owned entirely by Random House, the German media corporation subsidiary of Bertelsmann; it is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. It was formed in 1945 by Walter B. Pitkin, Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, and Ian and Betty Ballantine...
). The novel - a story of intrigue involving four brides-to-be with secrets - was excerpted by Cosmopolitan Magazine and released as a made-for-TV movie starring Connie Sellecca
Connie Sellecca
Connie Sellecca is an American actress and former model, primarily known for her roles on television.- Early life :She was born Concetta Sellecchia in The Bronx, New York, New York to Italian parents. At age twelve, she moved to Pomona, New York and attended Pomona Junior High School...
, Twiggy
Twiggy
Lesley Lawson née Hornby known as Twiggy is an English model, actress, and singer. In the early-1960s she became a prominent British teenage model of swinging sixties London with others such as Penelope Tree....
and Ken Howard
Ken Howard
Kenneth Joseph "Ken" Howard, Jr. is an American actor, best known for his roles as Thomas Jefferson in 1776 and as basketball coach and former Chicago Bulls player Ken Reeves in the television show The White Shadow...
.
In 1996, again writing as Jillian Karr, the writing team published Catch Me If You Can (Avon Books), a suspense novel about a kidnapped Miss America
Miss America
The Miss America pageant is a long-standing competition which awards scholarships to young women from the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands...
.
Both Jillian Karr books were published in hardcover and paperback editions and in multiple languages.
Having been told that her paternal grandfather had survived the Cherry Mine disaster, the worst mine fire in the history of the United States, Tintori began an exploration into the disaster that took the lives of 259 men and boys deep inside an Illinois coal mine. The result was Trapped: The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster (Atria Books, 2002). The book explores the senseless way the fire began, the failed efforts to rescue those down below, the heroism both above and below ground, and the impact it had on the lives of those involved. Increasingly interested in her family genealogy and heritage, she recounts the experiences of immigrants, including her own relatives, who had recently come from countries throughout Europe - particularly Italy - seeking success and finding only suffering and death in that mine. After its hardcover release, the book was published in paperback.
Trapped has been optioned for film.
In 2007, she returned to the world of fiction, again collaborating with her writing partner. Now writing as Karen Tintori and Jill Gregory, the duo published The Book of Names (St. Martin’s Press). The book is a thriller based on the actual principles of the Kabbalah, which teaches that the world’s existence requires that it be occupied by 36 righteous souls, called Lamed vovniks, or Tzadikim Nistarim
Tzadikim Nistarim
The Tzadikim Nistarim or Lamed Vav Tzadikim , often abbreviated to Lamed Vav, refers to 36 Righteous people, a notion rooted within the more mystical dimensions of Judaism. The singular form is Tzadik Nistar .-Origins:...
in Hebrew.
The novel begins with 33 of them murdered and the start of a race to keep them alive. The book has been published worldwide and translated into 20 languages. In particular, it is a best-seller in Germany, where websites and contests have been created about the book, with prizes including a trip to England.
The book is published in hardcover, paperback, audio and electronic formats.
Later that same year, Tintori revealed her own family’s secret history – buried for 80 years out of guilt and shame – when she published Unto The Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing
Honor killing
An honor killing or honour killing is the homicide of a member of a family or social group by other members, due to the belief of the perpetrators that the victim has brought dishonor upon the family or community...
in a Sicilian-American Family (St. Martin’s Press). The book is a narrative nonfiction about the murder of her great aunt, Frances Costa, in a Sicilian honor killing in Detroit 1919. Tintori has explained that she wrote the book to give Aunt Frances back her name and identity, to expose the ugly customs and traditions of honor for honor’s sake, and to restore dignity to the new generations of women who followed. In that sense, Unto The Daughters is not only an account of the legacy of Sicilian culture but an intensely personal family memoir.
The book has been published in hardcover and paperback.
Both Trapped and Unto The Daughters were taught in an Italian-American studies class at The Harvard University Extension School in the Spring of 2008.
Tintori will be returning to her collaboration with Gregory in 2008 when St. Martin’s Press releases the novel, The Illumination, another spiritual thriller. The book will also be simultaneously published in Germany.
Tintori is a member of International Thriller Writers and Novelists Inc.
Relationship to Italy and Commitment to Italian American Heritage
Increasingly interested in her Italian heritage, Tintori acquired Italian citizenship in 2006, and is now a dual citizen of the U.S. and Italy. She and her husband have been studying the Italian language for many years, have been to Italy five times, and have grown increasingly close to its land and people. Tintori has also developed working relationships with several other writers in Italy.She and her husband are members of the Italian American Cultural Society.
Books
• What Does Being Jewish Mean? -- Read-Aloud Responses To Questions Jewish Children Ask About History, Culture and Religion by Rabbi E. B. Freedman, Jan Greenberg, Karen A. (Tintori) Katz, Simon & Schuster: Prentice Hall Press 1991; updated Fireside 2003• Something Borrowed, Something Blue by Jillian Karr, Doubleday 1993; Bantam Books 1994
• Catch Me If You Can by Jillian Karr, Avon 1996
• Trapped: The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster by Karen Tintori, Atria 2002; Washington Square Press 2003
• The Book of Names by Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori, St. Martin’s Press 2007
• Unto The Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian-American Family by Karen Tintori, St. Martin’s Press 2007
• The Illumination by Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori, St. Martin's Press (scheduled for 2008)
External links
- http://www.karentintori.com www.karentintori.com. For more detailed information on Tintori's books and appearances.
- http://www.holtzbrinckus.com www.holtzbrinckus.com. Further information from St. Martin's Press.