Alice Driver is a James Beard Award-winning investigative journalist and public speaker from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. She is the author of Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company (One Signal Publishers 2024). In 2024, the book won the Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.  In her work and writing, Driver focuses on the American food system, immigration, and unjust labor practices. You can contact the Simon & Schuster Speaker's Bureau to invite Driver to speak at an event.

Driver is the author of More or Less Dead (University of Arizona, 2015) and the translator of Abecedario de Juárez (University of Texas, 2022). Driver recently interviewed poet Homer Aridjis and authors Mario Bellatin and  Elena Poniatowska in Mexico City for the Library of Congress PALABRA archive. 

In 2025, Driver attended The Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center Residency, whose former residents include Maya Angelou and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  In 2024, Driver won the Donald Robinson Memorial Award for Investigative Journalism for her work at Civil Eats. In 2023, Driver won a James Beard Award for investigative reporting. Driver has been a resident at the Yaddo artist retreat, Mesa Refuge, where she was a Michael Pollan Journalism Fellow, the Logan Nonfiction Program, and Jentel Artist Residency. Driver writes for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, and National Geographic  and produces podcasts for Reveal, Radio Ambulante, and Las Raras.

Driver was born in rural Arkansas in a house built by her potter father and weaver mother. She attended Berea College in rural Kentucky, founded in 1855 to educate formerly enslaved people and students with limited economic resources. Berea College charges no tuition, and thanks to its mission, she was able to take the years of financial risk needed to become a writer. Writing is how she seeks justice and equality in a world far from that.

She has a Ph.D.(2011) and MA (2008) in Hispanic Studies from the University of Kentucky and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City. She studied Spanish and Portuguese at Middlebury College Language Schools. 

She lives in Phoenix, Arizona where she is a Journalist in Residence at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, part of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. 

Painting: A self-portrait by Liu Xiaodong with Alice Driver on the U.S.-Mexico border, 2019 at Massimodecarlo Gallery, $650,000.