Alice Driver is a writer from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. You can pre-order her forthcoming book, 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.  Driver is working on a memoir, Artists All Around (Princeton Architectural Press 2025). It is about her family's relationship with Maurice Sendak, the author of Where the Wild Things Are. 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 author Mario Bellatin in Mexico City for the Library of Congress PALABRA archive.

In 2024, Driver was nominated for a James Beard Award for investigative reporting with the team at Civil Eats. Driver contributed to the book Food Stories: Writing That Stirs the Pot, which was nominated for a 2024 James Beard Award in the Literary Writing category. In 2023, Driver won a James Beard Award for investigative reporting. In 2023, Driver spent six weeks as a resident at Yaddo artist retreat. That year, she 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 writes for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, and National Geographic. 

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.