Sonja Livingston
Sonja Livingston is the author of four books of literary nonfiction. Her latest, "The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion," chronicles her startling return to Catholicism and uses the return to launch various expeditions through space and time to explore Roman Catholic tradition with new eyes. "Ladies' Night at the Dreamland," combines memory, research and imagination to provide poetic profiles of historic women. "Queen of the Fall," weaves together strands of memory with icons from 1980s/90s pop culture, religion and mythology to consider the lives of women, while exploring beauty, fertility and longing. Her award-winning memoir of pervasive childhood poverty, "Ghostbread," was widely adopted for classroom and book club use. Sonja's writing has earned an AWP Book Award in Nonfiction, a NYFA Fellowship, an Iowa Review Award, and a Susan Atefat Essay Prize. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the Virginia Commonwealth University.
“I was hers in ways that those with loyalties of convenience cannot fathom. I loved her beyond words and clothes, and yes beyond even pain. The strangest of things is the way the hungry always return to the very same hand. The hand they know. The one that cannot give.”
“Ideals and opportunities and social theorizing are just fine, but if you must understand only one thing, it is this: a warm hand and words whispered into the ear are what we want. Paths that can be seen and followed and walked upon are what we most need....And in the end, the thing that feeds us, no matter how tenuous, is what we will reach for.”