Alice Driver, an investigative journalist and author from Arkansas, will speak at University of the Ozarks on Thursday, Nov. 2, as part of the University’s 2023-24 Walton Arts & Ideas Series.
Driver’s presentation will begin at 7 p.m. in the Rogers Conference Center. There is no cost for admission and the public is invited to attend.
Driver recently completed a book about labor rights titled, “The Life and Death of the American Worker,” which documents “immigrant essential workers at America’s largest meat and poultry processing company.” The book is scheduled to come out in Spring 2024 via Astra Publishing House.
She writes for The New Yorker, National Geographic, and The New York Review of Books. In 2023, she won a James Beard Award for Investigative reporting.
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, Driver said she was able to take the years of financial risk needed to become a writer. She describes writing as a way 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 a master’s in art degree (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.
Driver is currently working on a memoir about her family’s relationship with writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak titled, “Artists All Around.” This book tells the story of “a lifelong friendship between the author’s mother and the writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak.” Sendak, the author and illustrator of “Where the Wild Things Are,” and Driver’s mother, fiber artist Louise Halsey, exchanged letters for 57 years, beginning when Halsey was only 8 years old and continuing until Sendak’s death in 2012. “Artists All Around” is expected to release in Spring 2025 by Princeton Architectural Press.
Topics: Community Events