The Black Angels

by Maria Smilios
Meet Maria
Maria Smilios an award winning author of The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis.
She was born and raised in New York City and holds a Masters of Arts from Boston University in Religion & Literature where she was a Henry Luce Scholar and a Presidential Scholar. She also taught Essay and Research writing in the university’s writing program.
In 2007, she left Boston and moved back to New York City to teach English literature at an all-girls high school.
While working as a developmental editor for Springer Science & Media she read a line in a book that led her to discover the story of the Black Angels.
The Black Angels won the 2024 Christopher Award in literature, which celebrates works that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” It was also a finalist for the prestigious Gotham Book Prize, an NASW Science in Society Journalism finalist, an NPR Science Friday Summer Read for 2024, and shortlisted for the English PEN literary award.
Additionally, New York City and State honored Maria for “outstanding service” and “positive contribution” to the people of New York.  The book greatly informed the Staten Island Museum’s exhibit Taking Care: The Black Angels of Sea View,” which is on display permanently. 
Most recently, Maria worked with New York City to have a street named after the Black Angels. In May, that became a reality, and the entrance to Sea View, where they worked is now officially BLACK ANGELS WAY. 
Through writing the book, she has become in involved in advocating for health equity, especially affordable and accessible TB drugs in TB heavy countries by working with and supporting organizations such as EndTB, TB Alliance, and Partners in Health.
In the past, she has written for The Guardian, Narratively, The Rumpus, Dame Magazine, The Forward, Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, The Emancipator, Newsweek, among others.
She is an adjunct lecturer at Columbia University School of Public Health and keynote speaker.
The Black Angels is her first book.
About the book: "Unpacking for Greece"

New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage.
In the pre-antibiotic days when tuberculosis stirred people’s darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the stric­tures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed sanatorium, dubbed “the pest house,” where it was said that “no one left alive.”
Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this remarkable true story follows the intrepid young women known by their patients as the “Black Angels.” For twenty years, they risked their lives work­ing under appalling conditions while caring for New York’s poorest residents, who languished in wards, waiting to die, or became guinea pigs for experimental surgeries and often deadly drugs. But despite their major role in desegregating the New York City hospital system—and their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculo­sis at Sea View—these nurses were completely erased from history. The Black Angels recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this riveting story, celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival.

What readers are saying

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ NEW YORK TIMES – Meredith Wadman Tuberculosis Was Horrible. They Did What They Could When white employees refused to work in a notorious hospital, Maria Smilios writes in “The Black Angels,” these nurses came to the aid of New Yorkers. In her first book, “The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis,” Smilios paints an indelible portrait of an era when this untreatable bane killed one American every 11 minutes. Others have covered this territory before. But this account breaks new ground by recovering the forgotten heroics of a corps of Black women who stepped into a void that no one else would fill.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐  Kat – I was expecting a book about nurses, and this is so much more. Read this amazing story and be transported to a very volatile time complete with 2 world wars. The strength of these women is unfathomable, and yet the medical piece is so reminiscent of what my fellow nurses and I went through with the Covid19 outbreak. There is so much more to this story and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles. While reading, I quickly learned how ignorant I was to life during this time. You will not regret this read. May the accomplishments of these ladies live on.

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