Melissa Ziobro, curator at the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music and specialist professor of public history, will host a virtual author talk, “I Looked Up and There Was the Sky: The 2021 Mullica Hill Tornado,” on Sept. 20 from noon to 1 p.m. The event is run by the NJ State Library.
Ziobro will give a retrospective of the devastating EF-3 tornado that swept through Mullica Hill, NJ, and surrounding areas in Sept. 2021, drawing from contemporary news coverage and interviews with 32 community members that she conducted for the Harrison Township Historical Society from Feb. to June 2022. The talk will cover the destruction and community rebuilding, as well as what lessons can be learned from this unprecedented event.
Ziobro is currently president of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, and served for many years as the editor for New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, a joint venture of the NJ Historical Commission, Rutgers University Libraries, and Monmouth University. She is also a trustee of the NJ Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Foundation, the Ocean County Historical Society, the Monmouth County Historical Association, the InfoAge Science and History Museums at the Camp Evans National Historic Landmark, and Preservation NJ.