Genesee Reading Series: Sonja Livingston and Rachel Hall

Sonja Livingston‘s latest book, The Virgin of Prince Street, uses an unexpected return to her childhood church in Rochester as an occasion to travel through space and time to explore the changes in the larger Church and in her own life. The result is a generous but unflinching look at the shifting Roman Catholic Church and personal concepts of devotion. Sonja’s first book, Ghostbread, won an AWP Book Prize for Nonfiction and has been widely adopted for classroom use. Her writing tackles subjects often not spoken of aloud, such as class, gender and religion and has been honored with a NYFA Fellowship, an Iowa Review Award, a VanderMey Nonfiction Prize, an Arts & Letters Essay Prize, and grants from Vermont Studio Center and The Deming Fund for Women.

Sonja is an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and also teaches in the Postgraduate Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Rachel Hall is the author of Heirlooms (BkMk Press) which was selected by Marge Piercy for the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize. Winner of the Phillip McMath Post Publication Award, Heirlooms was also the runner-up for the Edward Wallant award, and finalist for the Balcones Prize for Fiction, the Montaigne Medal, and the Eric Hoffer Award. Rachel’s short stories and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies including Black Warrior Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, Fifth Wednesday, Guernica, and New Letters, which awarded her the Alexander Cappon Prize for Fiction. She has received other honors and awards from Lilith, Glimmer Train, Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ conferences, Ragdale, the Ox-Bow School of the Arts, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Hall is a Professor of English in the creative writing program at the State University of New York at Geneseo.