About the Author
Alicia J Rouverol is a writer, scholar and lecturer. Her first co-authored book, ‘I Was Content and Not Content’: The Story of Linda Lord and the Closing of Penobscot Poultry (SIU, 2000), was nominated for the OHA Book Award and called ‘a compassionate and sorely needed book’ by The New York Times and nominated for the Oral History Book Award. Dry River, released by Bridge House Publishing in 2023, is her first novel.
Alicia J Rouverol's fiction focuses on issues explored previously through folklore, oral history and nonfiction: worker culture, time and the effects of economic decline.
She has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Society of Authors' Foundation for her collaborative oral history-performance project in a correctional setting, the Brown Creek Life Review Project, nominated for the Helen and Martin Schwartz Humanities Prize. Her documentary work has been funded by foundations, arts and humanities councils, and housed in archives across the US, e.g. the Library of Congress and UC-Berkeley.
She has taught oral history at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and UNC’s Southern Oral History Program, where she was Assistant Director and, previously, Associate Director at the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History. Her academic articles in oral history have been published nationally, internationally, translated, taught and anthologised.
She now writes critically on globalisation in contemporary fiction and women’s experimental writing.
A graduate of the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester (MA, 2013; PhD, 2017), she is a recipient of scholarships to Mendocino Coast Writers Conference,
Solstice Summer Writers Conference, and Sarah Lawrence College Summer Writers Seminar.
In 2019, she was an inaugural Artist in Residence at John Rylands Library, where she develop her collection, Granite Rock and Other Stories (forthcoming, Bridge House Publishing).
Other projects include: The Other Side of Darwin, a(nother) novel critiquing neoliberalism; and The Men at Brown Creek: Lessons from a Penitentiary, based on the Brown Creek Life Review Project, and featuring photographs by long-time collaborator, Cedric N. Chatterley.
Her fiction, nonfiction, hybrid writing and poetry have appeared in journals in the US and the UK (see ‘Publications’). She has been a contributing writer for ParentsDigest.com and a contributing reviewer for The Monitor and The Manchester Review. She has served as a reader and worked for Narrative magazine.
Her nonfiction is represented by Bonnie Nadell of Hill Nadell Literary Agency, Los Angeles, California. She is currently seeking representation for her fiction.
She makes her home with her family in Manchester, UK, where, since 2019, she has lectured in creative writing at the University of Salford.