CANR
WORK TITLE: Life and Death of the American Worker
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WEBSITE: https://www.alicedriver.com/
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PERSONAL
Born in AR.
EDUCATION:Berea College, B.A.; University of Kentucky, M.A., 2008, Ph.D. 2011. Also attended Middlebury College and performed postdoctoral work at Universidad Nacial Autónoma de México.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, translator, educator, and video producer. Arizona State University, Tempe, research assistant professor. Has volunteered at the nonprofit agency, Asilegal.
MEMBER:Overseas Press Club of America.
AWARDS:James Beard Award for Investigative Reporting, 2023; Donald Robinson Memorial Award for Investigative Journalism, 2024; Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize, Columbia Journalism School and Neiman Foundation for Journalism, for Life and Death of the American Worker, 2024. Residencies at Yaddo, Mesa Refuge, and the Bellagio Center.
WRITINGS
Contributor to publications, including Oxford American, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and National Geographic. Contributor to books, including Food Stories: Writing That Stirs the Pot.
SIDELIGHTS
Originally from Arkansas, Alice Driver is a writer, journalist, translator, educator, and video producer. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Berea College and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. Driver has served as a research assistant professor at Arizona State University and has contributed to publications, including Oxford American, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and National Geographic. Her first book, More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico, was released in 2015.
In 2024, Driver published Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company. Driver began investigating meatpacking plants in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic, when those plants became hotbeds for virus transmission. During her investigation, she learned of poor working conditions and various alleged abuses committed by meatpacking plant leaders against their mostly-immigrant workers. Driver highlights an incident in Springdale, AR, during which 173 workers were hospitalized after inhaling toxic gas at a meatpacking plant owned by Tyson. One of those workers was Placido Leopoldo Arrue, whom Driver profiles and who later died of COVID-19.
Critics offered favorable assessments of Life and Death of the American Worker. “This is a vital work of journalism,” asserted a Kirkus Reviews contributor. The same contributor described the book as “an astonishing exposé of the American meatpacking industry’s exploitation of its incarcerated and immigrant workforce.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly commented: “Driver’s prose is sumptuous and empathetic” and added: “This is a tour de force.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2024, review of Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company.
Publishers Weekly, July 29, 2024, review of Life and Death of the American Worker, p. 51.
ONLINE
Alice Driver website, https://www.alicedriver.com/ (October 9, 2024).
Arizona State University website, https://search.asu.edu/ (October 9, 2024), author faculty profile.
Overseas Press Club of America website, https://opcofamerica.org/ (January 29, 2019), author interview.
Pulitzer Center website, https://pulitzercenter.org/ (October 9, 2024), author profile.
Vela, https://velamag.com/ (October 9, 2024), author interview.
Alice Driver is a writer from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. She is the author of Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company (One Signal Publishers 2024). In 2024, the book won the Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Driver is working on a memoir, Artists All Around (Princeton Architectural Press 2025). It is about her family's relationship with Maurice Sendak, the author of Where the Wild Things Are. Driver is the author of More or Less Dead (University of Arizona, 2015) and the translator of Abecedario de Juárez (University of Texas, 2022). Driver recently interviewed poet Homer Aridjis and author Mario Bellatin in Mexico City for the Library of Congress PALABRA archive.
In 2025, Driver will attend The Bellagio Center Residency whose former residents include Maya Angelou and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. In 2024, Driver won the Donald Robinson Memorial Award for Investigative Journalism for her work at Civil Eats. That same year, Driver was nominated for a James Beard Award for investigative reporting with the team at Civil Eats. Driver contributed to the book Food Stories: Writing That Stirs the Pot, which was nominated for a 2024 James Beard Award in the Literary Writing category. In 2023, Driver won a James Beard Award for investigative reporting. In 2023, Driver spent six weeks as a resident at Yaddo artist retreat. That year, she interviewed Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska for the Library of Congress PALABRA archive. In 2022, Driver was a resident at Mesa Refuge where she was a Michael Pollan Journalism Fellow, a fellow at the Logan Nonfiction Program, and a resident at Jentel Artist Residency. Driver writes for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, and National Geographic.
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, she was able to take the years of financial risk needed to become a writer. Writing is how 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 MA (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.
Painting: A self-portrait by Liu Xiaodong with Alice Driver on the U.S.-Mexico border, 2019 at Massimodecarlo Gallery, $650,000.
Meet the OPC Members: Q&A With Alice Driver
Posted January 29, 2019 by OPC of America
Alice Driver on the job at a migrant shelter in Tapachula, Mexico. Photo: Cambria Harkey
Alice Driver is a bilingual journalist, translator and video producer based in Mexico City. Her work focuses on migration, human rights, and gender equality. Driver has filed work for a slew of media outlets, including National Geographic, REVEAL at the Center for Investigative Reporting, PBS, The Columbia Journalism Review, TIME, CNN, PRI.org, CBC Radio, BBC News, The New York Times and Cosmopolitan. She has also published a book, More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico [University of Arizona, 2015] which she completed during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City.
Hometown: Oark, Arkansas (pop. 200).
Education: Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Kentucky, postdoctoral fellowship at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City.
Languages you speak: English, Spanish, Portuguese.
First job in journalism: After I finished my postdoctoral fellowship, which supported the publication of my book, I began to work as a freelance journalist. I have never had a staff job in journalism.
Countries reported from: Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Peru, Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile, Barbados, Jamaica, The Bahamas, Myanmar.
When and why did you join the OPC? I joined the OPC in 2017 after my editor at CNN recommended it to me.
What sparked your interest in migration and human rights reporting?
I wrote a book about femicide in Mexico, More or Less Dead, and most of the victims were migrants so I knew that I wanted my next project to be about migration.
Major challenge as a journalist:
My biggest challenge as a freelancer is that outlets don’t adhere to contracts and don’t pay me on time. This puts me at risk and creates a lot of stress and instability.
Best journalism advice received:
“So much of the world needs the muscle found in true words. Please keep sending what your head and belly make as one loaf.” – poet Nikky Finney who was my professor at Berea College in Kentucky where I did my undergraduate degree.
Worst experience as a journalist:
One time, a migrant whom I met at a shelter got my phone number from the migrant shelter (I had left my business card with some of the workers there), and he wrote me both on FB and via text asking me for a large amount of money. The way that he asked made me feel like he was going to threaten me if I didn’t respond. I blocked him on both platforms and thankfully did not hear anything else from him.
When traveling, you like to…
I like wandering the streets and eating local food which is a good way to get a feel for a place.
Hardest story: I reported a story last year from Nicaragua and was in the country at a time when the streets were full of protests and pro-government forces were shooting citizens in the streets. I didn’t witness violence but the streets of Managua felt volatile.
Journalism heroes: Ginger Thompson, Marcela Turati, Masha Geesen, Roxane Gay, Pamela Colloff.
Dream job: I am living my dream job, but I need to get to the point where outlets pay me on time and respect contracts (or to the point where I can afford to have a lawyer on retainer).
Favorite quote: I interviewed journalist Francisco Goldman a few years ago, and he said, “Identify what it is you want to do and without necessarily understanding it, completely commit. It’s risky. It’s like what Bolaño said in his famous Venezuela speech, ‘What is good writing? It’s not good writing. It’s knowing that writing is looking into an abyss.’ Sometimes the abyss will destroy you.”
Place you’re most eager to visit:
I would love to work on a project in the Philippines and have discussed a few ideas with photographer Lynzy Billing.
Most over-the-top assignment:
TIME magazine sent me on a five-day assignment covering the migrant caravan in Mexico with Magnum photographer Jerome Sessini. I love photography and so the over-the-top part of the assignment for me was being paired with a photographer who has managed to create iconic images over a period of decades.
Most common mistake you’ve seen:
Reporters who don’t learn languages or take the time to understand the cultural context of events when they are reporting outside of their home country.
Country you most want to return to: Brazil.
Twitter handle: @DriverWrites
Featured Writer: Alice Driver
By Vela
1. How did you end up in Mexico City? Can you talk about your trajectory as an academic?
The day after I defended my dissertation at the University of Kentucky, I moved to Mexico City to volunteer at Asilegal (a non-profit that works with vulnerable groups such as women, indigenous people, and the poor to help advocate for their legal rights) and to work as a freelance writer.
Writing my dissertation was a long, lonely process. I wrote about the representation of violence against women in Juárez, Mexico in film, literature and photography, and after three years of writing, I wanted to be reimmersed in the world of the living. I wanted to understand violence against women from a different point of view, to work with and speak with those affected by violence. I volunteered with Asilegal for four months, and, although I learned a lot during that time, I also became aware that my bosses were stealing money from the NGO. It was a heartbreaking time.
In terms of my trajectory as an academic, I got my Ph.D. purely out of a love for literature. I always wanted to be a writer, but I was afraid to admit it because I was afraid of failure.
2. How do you navigate being a creative writer in academia? What kind of tension do you feel between those worlds, and how do they influence each other?
There is a definite tension between the two worlds. The problem for me, the reason I have moved towards creative writing and journalism, is that in academia, literary theory has become a sacred cow. Everything has to be written and discussed in light of theory, mostly the heavyweights like Foucault, Agamben, Benjamin, etc. While theory can be useful for analyzing some subjects, mostly it is abused, and it makes for boring, tedious writing.
What I realized in the process of getting my Ph.D. was 1) As far as I can tell, almost nobody reads academic writing by choice 2) I don’t even enjoy reading my own academic writing. So after finishing graduate school I tried to remedy this by writing articles about women’s rights and human rights for Women’s Media Center and other NGOs. I loved the fact that a whole community of people I didn’t know read, commented on and acted out based on things I had written. This year I have discovered a happy balance where my creative writing feeds off my academic research.
3. Your Vela story, “Disappearances Have To Disappear,” struggles with the ethics of representation. How do you deal with that in your own work? How do you decide what to put in and leave out, and what kinds of questions do you take into consideration when writing about violence and Juárez?
I struggle with the issue of ethics a lot in my own work because I am very aware of my status as an outsider. I am not from the Juárez nor have I lived there, and yet I am drawn to read about, study and write about the area. I came to study Juárez through literature and film, and got to know the place and its people and landscapes through words and images. When I went there for the first time in 2010, it was a secret trip, because my university would not give me approval to conduct research in what was then considered the most dangerous city in the world.
When I write about the city I try to focus on individual stories, to weave them together in a way that tells about daily life. I feel like the humanity of the city and its people often gets lost in the news about violence.
4. Can you share a moment of utter writing despair, and one breakthrough moment?
There have been many moments of despair, years of despair even, because I never felt like a writer. However, I think all of those internal struggles gave me the grit to keep going and also made me realize that I have to love writing as a process. The moment I want someone else’s approval or recognition is when I give someone else control over my happiness.
One specific period [of despair] was when I moved back home to rural Arkansas to live with my parents and to write. Where I grew up in the Ozark Mountains is an extremely rural area, and I thought it would be the perfect place to focus on writing. I liked to imagine that I was a writer who would flourish alone in the woods. However, I ended up feeling extremely isolated living in a place where the only living thing I saw on a daily basis was my parent’s mean cat, Katia (my parents lived during the week in Little Rock, so I didn’t see them that often). I realized that given my extremely social nature, moving to rural Arkansas was not actually a good writing situation for me. Rather than writing, I spent a lot of my days crying.
It was after that period in Arkansas that I decide to move to Mexico City. I absolutely ate up the frenetic energy of the city, and all of that movement and interaction flowed out of me and into my writing. I realized that I was not the writer I always read about, the one who lived in some secluded area and wrote in a quiet room. I felt like I had internalized one particular idea of a writer, and had tried to make myself be that person.
However, in Mexico City, my breakthrough was to be myself, to love graffiti, jugglers, street vendors, and fried pigskin, to wander the city and take in sights, sounds and images until I was bursting at the seams.
5. Who have been major influences for you as a writer? What are you reading right now?
As a child, I loved Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue. In Pierre, the main character, a spoiled little boy, is threatened by a lion to behave or else get eaten. In Maurice’s drawing, tiny Pierre stands in front of the lion and the line goes, “I don’t care, said Pierre.” I loved that as a child and used to run around telling my parents or anyone I didn’t want to listen to, “I don’t care, said Pierre.”
Even now, as an adult, I sometimes still say it. Maurice was a good friend of my Mom’s so it is hard for me to separate his writing from stories of him. About a year before he died, I visited him in Connecticut, in the wealthy neighborhood where he lived. We sat down to lunch, and he proceeded to tell a story about a recent walk in the park. He said, “The other day I went out for a walk in the park in my neighborhood. I was walking when suddenly this wealthy lady rode up on her horse and said, ‘aren’t you that famous writer. Can I stop by your house and get you to autograph a book for my daughter?’ And I shouted ‘I’m going to kill you.’”
He was a curmudgeon but goddamned if it wasn’t beautiful to hear the truth, to laugh at this tiny writer of “children’s books” (he hated being described as a children’s writer) absolutely terrorizing all those who might try to make him be someone he wasn’t. He was a tyrant, but a truthful one. Women simply aren’t allowed to behave like that, which is why I aspire to be like him.
In college, I had poet Nikky Finney as a professor, and taking her class on the Harlem Renaissance convinced me that I was a writer. In 2011, when Finney won the National Book Award in Poetry, her spoken word acceptance speech brought me to tears. C.E. Morgan’s All the Living is one of the most quietly powerful books I have ever read. She and I went to Berea College at the same time, and I always remember her for her Pepsi addiction. I love Junot Díaz for his irreverence and sense of humor (This is How You Lose Her made me laugh until I cried) and the way he pulls off having a dirty fucking mouth even in academic settings (In 2010 I heard him give a lecture at Indiana University). If I could be reincarnated as any writer, it would probably be Peter Hessler, whose travel narratives about China (Oracle Bones, River Town) changed the way I thought about travel writing. Hessler showed me that it was possible to tell stories about change and about an entire country by following individuals over a period of years. Given my love of testimony and interviews, this was an important revelation in terms of my own writing.
I just finished reading Wild and Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed. She captures so well the raw, human beauty that can be found in making a mess of everything.
6. How does photography influence your writing?
Photography entered my life in a serendipitous way. I had never considered myself a photographer, had never owned a real camera. However, when I was working on my dissertation, a writer I interviewed said, “Hey, you should meet Julián Cardona, a photographer from Juárez.” This was in 2009, and, at that time, I didn’t think photography had anything to do with my project. However, meeting Julián ended up changing the course of my research and, in many ways, my life.
After meeting Julián, I began to interview other photographers about their work on Juárez. When I moved to Mexico City in 2011, I wandered the city with my camera and spent weekends at markets like La Lagunilla and El Chopo, sometimes with other photographers.
On a whim, I sent a photo I took at La Lagunilla with my Iphone to National Geographic. In 2012, almost a year after submitting the photo, I got an email from Julián titled, “Your photo in National Geographic.” He had been reading the magazine and spotted my photo. Although the editors of NG had sent me an email stating that the might publish my photo, I never really believed it.
Photography has influenced my writing in that I have become even more visual and detail oriented. I am a collector of strange images, and I carry them around with me until they come together and form stories. I like to make connections between images, places, and events that seem to have nothing in common.
***
Alice is currently at work on a short film project about Juárez photographers Julián Cardona and Jaime Bailléres.
In her recent essay for Vela, she writes, “I wanted to pull the flesh from the bone, to strip away the images or move beyond them and strike at something hard and real. I wanted to find the stories behind the images, to meet the photographers who, for decades, had lived and worked in the city whose images they captured.”
Alice Driver
Research Assistant Professor,
Journalism & Mass Comm
alice.driver@asu.edu
Mail code: 2020
Campus: Dtphx
Biography
Research
Long Bio
Dr. Alice Driver a holds Ph.D.(2011) and MA (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. She is reporting The Life and Death of the American Worker, a book about labor rights and immigration (Astra House 2024). She is working on a memoir about her family's relationship with writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak titled Artists All Around (Princeton Architectural Press 2025). Driver is the author of More or Less Dead (University of Arizona, 2015) and the translator of Abecedario de Juárez (University of Texas, 2022).
Education
Dr. Alice Driver a holds Ph.D.(2011) and MA (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. She holds a B.A. in Spanish and English from Berea College.
Google Scholar URL
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-VxP26cAAAAJ&hl=en
Research Interests
Alice Driver is a Research Assistant Professor for Gender-Based Violence in El Salvador. She is the author of a book about feminicide, More or Less Dead (University of Arizona Press, 2015). Driver has spent the past decade investigating issues at the intersection of gender-based violence and migration in Latin America.
Publications
BOOKS
Artists All Around. Princeton Architectural Press. Spring 2025.
The Life and Death of the American Worker. Astra House. Spring 2024.
More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico. University of Arizona Press. March 2015.
BOOK TRANSLATIONS
Cardona, Julián. Abecedario de Juárez: An Illustrated Lexicon. Trans. Alice Driver. The University of Texas Press. 2022.
Alice Driver
GRANTEE
Alice Driver is a writer from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. She writes for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, and National Geographic. She is working on the book The Life and Death of the American Worker (Astra House 2024).
Driver has a Ph.D. (2011) and M.A. (2008) in Hispanic Studies from the University of Kentucky, and she studied Spanish and Portuguese at Middlebury College Language Schools; she earned her B.A. from Berea College in Madison County, Kentucky. Driver was born in Oark, Arkansas, a town of 200, in a house built by her potter father and her weaver mother.
QUOTED: "This is a vital work of journalism."
"an astonishing exposé of the American meatpacking industry's exploitation of its incarcerated and immigrant workforce."
Driver, Alice LIFE AND DEATH OF THE AMERICAN WORKER One Signal/Atria (NonFiction None) $28.99 9, 3 ISBN: 9781668078822
A freelance journalist uncovers the inhumane conditions plaguing the Tyson Foods meatpacking plants in Arkansas.
In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, Driver, author of More or Less Dead, returned to her home state of Arkansas and began interviewing poultry workers at Tyson plants across the state. Although she risked infection, she felt the investigation couldn't wait. "Confronting a powerful company worth billions was daunting. However, as meatpacking workers began to die of COVID," she writes, "I continued to interview their families, hoping that people were ready to listen." The author reveals disturbing stories of workers whose lungs were destroyed by a chemical accident that Tyson failed to acknowledge; whose repetitive motion led not only to carpal tunnel syndrome, but to unconsciously continuing to imitate these motions in their sleep; and who worked for a pittance as an alternative to incarceration. "In addition to employing undocumented workers," writes Driver, "Tyson also exploits vulnerable prison populations." Throughout these experiences, the workers encountered unsympathetic administrators holding up oppressive systems, including managers who waited outside restroom doors to ensure that workers took inhumanely quick breaks, nurses and doctors who denied workers proper care, and politicians who ignored these practices in order to line their own pockets--most notably, Bill Clinton. "As the governor of Arkansas," writes the author, "Clinton oversaw lax regulations on the meatpacking industry, leading to the contamination of drinking water and hundreds of miles of rivers and streams." This devastatingly frank, brutally detailed peek into the meatpacking industry brilliantly exposes a damaging system that must be reformed. While the ending of the book, which briefly comments on lab-grown meat, feels disconnected from the rest of the story, overall, this is a vital work of journalism.
An astonishing exposé of the American meatpacking industry's exploitation of its incarcerated and immigrant workforce.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Driver, Alice: LIFE AND DEATH OF THE AMERICAN WORKER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332969/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=41c3220a. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.
QUOTED: "Driver's prose is sumptuous and empathetic."
"This is a tour de force."
Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company
Alice Driver. One Signal, $28.99 (256p) ISBN 978-1-6680-7882-2
The horrifying labor violations of meatpacking behemoth Tyson and the harrowing ordeal of the undocumented immigrant workforce that fought back are revealed in this shocking expose from journalist Driver (More or Less Dead). The company's ill-treatment of workers at a plant in Springdale, Ark., included startlingly unsafe conditions leading to accidents and subsequent cover-ups. In one incident, a toxic gas leak resulted in the hospitalization of 173 workers (managers insisted workers remain at their stations, even as some began to faint; afterward, the company forced workers to sign liability waivers). One of those workers, Placido Leopoldo Arrue--whose story Driver follows closely--became seriously disabled by the exposure; he died of Covid in July 2020, likely made more vulnerable by the lung damage. Covid was the initial impetus for Driver's project--in 2020, as meatpacking workers in cramped conditions fell ill, Driver began investigating. Her subjects were reluctant to communicate by phone, and so her story takes her on road trips across the South to conduct in-person interviews, an intrepid effort of gumshoe journalism resulting in an intimate, unprecedented glimpse of the lives of America's undocumented workforce during the pandemic--which includes efforts by some workers to organize with a union and file lawsuits against Tyson. Throughout, Driver's prose is sumptuous and empathetic ("Looking down... they see their faces reflected in a pool of blood," she writes of workers on the assembly line). This is a tour de force. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 29, 29 July 2024, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A803782826/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a8967b22. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.