Sonja Livingston
Faculty, Postgraduate Writers' Conference
Profile
Livingston is an award-winning essayist whose work appears in publications such as Salon, The Kenyon Review, Sojourners, Brevity, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction.
Her first book, Ghostbread, won an AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction and has been widely adopted for classroom use. She is also the author of the essay collections, Queen of the Fall and Ladies Night at the Dreamland, which explore and illuminate the lives of women. Her latest collection of lyric essays (The Virgin of Prince Street, forthcoming 2020) blends elements of travel writing, historical research and spiritual memoir to examine Catholic tradition and personal concepts of devotion within a rapidly shifting religious landscape. Her essays are widely anthologized in texts such as Waveform: Twenty-First Century Essays By Women; Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction; Poverty/Privilege: A Reader; Southern Writers on Writing, and many others. Her writing has been honored with a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Iowa Review Award, an Arts & Letters Essay Prize, a VanderMay Nonfiction Award, and grants from Vermont Studio Center and The Deming Fund for Women. Sonja teaches in the MFA Program at Virginia Commonwealth University.
On the web: sonjalivingston.com