Meet Guest Literary Nonfiction Editor Sonja Livingston!

It is with great pleasure that we introduce our new Guest Literary Nonfiction Editor Sonja Livingston. Sonja will be filling in for Literary Nonfiction Editor Kristen Iversen, who was awarded a Taft Center Fellowship for the 2018–2019 academic year and will be busy researching and writing several books. Sonja will read literary nonfiction from September 5, when The Cincinnati Review opens for submissions, through the end of December.

A little about Sonja: She is an award-winning essayist whose work appears in publications such as Salon, Creative Nonfiction and Brevity. She is the author of three books of nonfiction; the latest, Ladies Night at the Dreamland, combines fact and imagination in a series of essays that resurrect the lives of long-gone women. Her first book, Ghostbread, won an AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction.

Sonja’s writing is widely anthologized and has been honored with a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Iowa Review Award, an Arts & Letters Essay Prize, a VanderMay Nonfiction Award, and grants from Vermont Studio Center and The Deming Fund for Women.

She teaches in the MFA Program at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Here’s what Sonja has to say regarding what she’d love to see in literary nonfiction submissions throughout fall 2018:

“I’m looking forward to reading some wild essays this semester. I don’t mean essays that take on dramatic topics or flashy forms—paradoxically, those can be tougher to pull off. I admire gorgeous language and the various craft moves a good writer learns to master, but what excites me most are essays that master us. These pieces often begin in the everyday and the easily overlooked—snow peas, for instance, or the tiny airplane tattoo inside your best friend’s wrist. A wild essay will take your snow peas and airplane tattoo (thank you very much) and hand you back a love letter to wonder or a contemplation on the various modes of flight. A wild essay uses the stuff of reality and, when the writer sticks with it and is willing to be discombobulated, creates something entirely, unexpectedly, and breathtakingly new.”

All of us here at CR are excited to read your lyric essays, memoir and personal writing, researched narrative nonfiction, and hybrid work! Please head over to our Submissions page to check out our updated guidelines.