Alice Driver

Alice Driver is a writer from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. She is reporting The Life and Death of the American Worker, a book about labor rights and immigration (Astra House 2024). She is working on a memoir about her mother's relationship with Maurice Sendak (formal announcement from the publisher forthcoming). Driver is the author of More or Less Dead (University of Arizona, 2015) and the translator of Abecedario de Juárez (University of Texas, 2022). 

In 2023, Driver will spend six weeks as a resident at Yaddo artist retreat. She recently interviewed Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska for the Library of Congress PALABRA archive. In 2022, Driver was a resident at Mesa Refuge where she was a Michael Pollan Journalism Fellow, a fellow at the Logan Nonfiction Program, and a resident at Jentel Artist Residency. Driver contributed a chapter to the labor anthology What Things Cost that includes Wendell Berry, Ocean Vuong and former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. Contact her agent, Kirsty McLachlan, at Morgan Green Creatives in London, for questions about rights, permissions, and legal issues. 

Driver was born in rural Arkansas in a house built by her potter father and her weaver mother. She attended Berea College in rural Kentucky, founded in 1855 to educate freed slaves 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 that is far from that.

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