Join us in celebration of Sonja Livingston’s newly published book, The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion (American Lives Series at University of Nebraska Press).

Rochester native and award-winning essayist, Sonja Livingston, will read from her newly published book, The Virgin of Prince Street, a collection of essays that chronicles the author’s return to her childhood church (the former Corpus Christi in Rochester) and uses that return to launch a series of sojourns that contemplate a rapidly shifting religious and cultural landscape.

Sonja Livingston is also the author of the award-winning Rochester memoir, Ghostbread, the essay collection, Ladies Night at the Dreamland, and Queen of the Fall, which was selected for the 2016 Rochester Reads program. Her essays are taught in classrooms around the nation and are anthologized in texts such as Waveform: Twenty-First Century Essays By Women; Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction; Poverty/Privilege: A Reader; Southern Writers on Writing, and many others. Her writing 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. Sonja is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and splits her time between Richmond and Rochester.

Copies of The Virgin of Prince Street will be available for purchase at the event.

Free and open to the public. No registration is required.

Hosted by the Arts & Literature Division and the Friends & Foundation of the Rochester Public Library. For more information call 428-8380 or contact Carol Moldt at Carol.Moldt@libraryweb.org.