Sonja Livingston
Faculty, Postgraduate Writers' Conference
Profile
Sonja Livingston’s latest book, The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion, was published by University of Nebraska Press as part of their American Lives Series, edited by Tobias Wolff. Her debut memoir, Ghostbread, won an AWP Book Prize for Nonfiction and has been adopted for classroom use around the nation. Her essay collections, Ladies Night at the Dreamland and Queen of the Fall, combine history, memory and imagination to illuminate the lives of girls and women.
Sonja’s essays appear in outlets such as Salon, LitHub, The Kenyon Review, America, Sojourners, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction, and are anthologized in many textbooks on creative writing, including The Best of Brevity, Contemporary Nonfiction, Short Takes, The Truth of the Matter, The Curious Writer, Poverty/Privilege: A Reader, Brief Encounters, and Waveform
Her writing has been honored with a NYFA Fellowship, an Iowa Review Award, a VanderMey Nonfiction Prize, an Arts & Letters Prize, and grants from Vermont Studio Center and The Deming Fund for Women. She is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, and has been a frequent member of the Conference faculty.