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 in the meatpacking industry (Astra House 2024). She is working on a memoir about her family's relationship with writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak titled Artists All Around (Princeton Architectural Press 2025). 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 won a James Beard Award for investigative reporting. Driver spent 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. Driver writes for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, and National Geographic. 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.

She is currently designing a workshop on gender-based violence for journalists in El Salvador via the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. 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. 

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