Praise

(Frauen)
“Time and again Owings probes, coaxes, humours and inveigles her way into cosy intimacy with a wide range of housewives, heroines, diehards, dissenters, ex-prisoners, ex-guards. … [in] this amusing, frightening, and consistently illuminating book.”
–Martin Amis, author of The Zone of Interest

“Thank you for your work and Indian Voices!”
-wrote author Louise Erdrich in a private note.

(Frauen)
“Oral history at its best.”
–Kirkus Reviews

A New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”

“In vivid and often poignant portraits-cum-interviews . . . [Owings] has captured the extraordinary diversity of their experiences . . . each portrait, each interview, provides valuable insight into what happened to half the German population between 1933 and 1945.”–New York Times Book Review

Alison Owings, author of three stereotype-challenging oral-history based books, including a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year,” has finished a fourth.

It is an unconventional, often humorous, wrenching, and inspiring tale about an extraordinary and resourceful African-American man — who is attempting to redeem his past by helping the disenfranchised people of the present. Meet 74-year-old Del Seymour, “the mayor of the Tenderloin” in San Francisco, whose addiction to crack led him into some 18 years of homelessness, hustling, pimping, and dealing — and who then, once clean, started Code Tenderloin, the astonishing organization teaching homeless, drug dealers, ex-felons, and other marginalized people how to get and keep a straight job.

A May 2020 article about him appeared in The New York Times:

Tech Is a Citadel. Del Seymour Built a Drawbridge.

The working title of Alison’s manuscript is Mayor of the Tenderloin, The Remarkable Life of Del Seymour.

As a work-in-progress, it received the 2018 Mayborn Biography Award.

Her earlier works include: 

Indian Voices / Listening to Native Americans

Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray

Frauen / German Women Recall the Third Reich.

Featured Article:

"The Offer": A homeless Vietnam vet gets an unexpected second chance, Salon, Nov 28, 2021

NEWS:

Alison, having founded the Washington, DC activist group "Don't Tear It Down," now the "D.C. Preservation League," was an honorary co-chair of the group's 50th anniversary gala.