About
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Sonja's latest nonfiction project blends research and imagination to explore and reclaim the branches of a broken family tree.
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Her first book, the childhood memoir Ghostbread, has been adopted for classroom use around the nation. Essay collections, Ladies Night at the Dreamland and Queen of the Fall, illuminate the lives of women while The Virgin of Prince Street uses an unexpected return to church and a search for a missing Marian statue to explore changing concepts of devotion in the culture and in her own life.
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Sonja's writing has been honored with an AWP Book Prize, NYFA Fellowship, an Iowa Review Award, a VanderMey Nonfiction Prize, an Arts & Letters Prize, and grants from Vermont Studio Center and The Deming Fund for Women. Her essays appear in journals such as Ploughshares, Salon, LitHub, The Kenyon Review, America, Sojourners and are anthologized in textbooks, including The Best of Brevity, Contemporary Nonfiction, Short Takes, The Truth of the Matter, The Curious Writer, Poverty/Privilege: A Reader, Brief Encounters, and Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women.
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Sonja is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and teaches in Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Conference. Sonja is married to the artist Jim Mott and splits her time between Virginia and New York State.
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For information on readings or to arrange a visit to your class or community group, send an email.
