Books by Sonja Livingston

The Virgin of Prince Street chronicles Sonja Livingston's quest to explore devotion and spirituality in her life. Meditations on quirky rituals and fading traditions thoughtfully and dynamically interrogate traditional elements of sacramental devotion, especially as they relate to shifting concepts of religion, relationships, and the sacred.

Whether pulled from the folds of memory, channeled through the icons of Greek mythology and Roman Catholicism, or filtered through the lens of pop culture, Sonja Livingston''s Queen of the Fall considers the lives of women. Exploring the legacies of those she has crossed paths with in life and in the larger culture, Livingston weaves together strands of memory with richly imagined vignettes to explore becoming a woman in late 1980s and early 1990s America.Along the way, the award-winning memoirist brings us face-to-face with herself as an inner-city girl-trying to imagine a horizon beyond poverty, fearful of her fertility and the limiting arc of teenage pregnancy. Livingston looks at the lives of those she''s known: friends who''ve gotten themselves into "trouble" and disappeared never to be heard from again, girls who tell their school counselor small lies out of necessity and pain, and a mother whose fruitfulness seems, at times, biblical. Livingston interacts with figures such as Susan B. Anthony, the Virgin Mary, and Ally McBeal to mine the terrain of her own femininity, fertility, and longing.Queen of the Fall is a dazzling meditation on loss, possibility, and, ultimately, what it means to be human.Sonja Livingston is an assistant professor in the MFA Program at the University of Memphis. Her first book, Ghostbread, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Book Prize for nonfiction.

At the Dreamland, women and girls flicker from the shadows to take their proper place in the spotlight. In this lyrical collection, Sonja Livingston weaves together strands of research and imagination to conjure figures from history, literature, legend, and personal memory.

One of seven children brought up by a single mother, Sonja Livingston was raised in areas of western New York that remain relatively hidden from the rest of America. Eschewing sentimentality, this memoir offers a meditation on what it means to hunger and shows that poverty can strengthen the spirit just as surely as it can grind it down.