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.  Driver is working on a memoir, Artists All Around (Princeton Architectural Press 2026). 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 authors Mario Bellatin and  Elena Poniatowska in Mexico City for the Library of Congress PALABRA archive. To invite Driver to speak at an event, you can contact the Simon & Schuster Speaker's Bureau. 

In 2025, Driver will attend The Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center Residency, whose former residents include Maya Angelou and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  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. 

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. 

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