Paulette Livers

Paulette Livers’s first novel, Cementville (Counterpoint Press, 2014), tells the story of a small Kentucky town in 1969 after seven of its most favored local sons were killed in the Vietnam War. The book won the Elle magazine Lettres Prize 2014 and was recently longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize by the Center for Fiction. Livers has received awards, residencies, and fellowships from the Artcroft Foundation, Aspen Writers Foundation, the Bedell Foundation, Center for the American West, Denver Women’s Press Club, Key West Literary Seminars, and Ox-Bow Artist Residence, among others. She received the 2012 David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction, and her work has been shortlisted for awards from Writers at Work and the International Bridport Prize, and received Honorable Mentions from Hunger Mountain and Red Hen Press. Her stories have appeared in Southwest Review, The Dos Passos Review, Spring Gun Press, and elsewhere, and can be heard at the audio-journal Bound Off. A member of PEN America and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Livers lives in Chicago.

“Paulette Livers is the real thing . . .a blazing talent with a fierce intelligence and a big heart, big enough to encompass a horrible tragedy and the inner life of an entire community. She has written a brilliant and deeply compassionate study of grief, violence, loneliness, and love. And her language sings. This is a stunning debut —a perfect novel with deep implications for our own time.” —Lee Smith