“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, author of Guests on Earth, Oral History, The Last Girls, and others

Photo by Sheli Hadari.

Paulette Livers* is the author of the novel Cementville which, with Joyce Carol Oates and Isabel Allende, was awarded the Elle magazine Lettres Prize and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award, Chicago Writers Association Fiction Book of the Year, and the Kentucky Literary Award. She grew up in Kentucky and has worked in Louisville, Atlanta, Boulder, and Chicago as a painter, illustrator, editor, and book designer for publishers around the country. Her lifelong love of writing and literature led her to join a writing group where she began to see her own writing as something to be shared beyond the privacy of her studio. Paulette has since received grants and fellowships from the Artcroft Foundation, Aspen Writers Foundation, the Bedell Foundation, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Illinois Arts Council, MacDowell Colony, Ox-Bow Artist Residence, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for Creative Artists. The recipient of the Meyerson Prize for Fiction, Denver Women’s Press Club Emerging Writers Award, and Kentucky Women Writers Conference Gabehart Prize, her work has been shortlisted or won honorable mentions from Britain’s International Bridport Prize, Hunger Mountain, Red Hen Press, [email protected], and the Center for the American West. Her stories have appeared in the Southwest Review, The Dos Passos Review, Spring Gun Press, and elsewhere and can be heard at the audio-journal Bound Off. Livers lives in Chicago, where she is Creative Director at Mighty Sword Studio, serving writers and publishers as a manuscript consultant, editor, and book designer.

*Livers is pronounced to rhyme with “divers”—not the bodily organ. Thank you!

Book groups
I love meeting with book clubs around the country, via Skype or in person if I’m in your area. Please see possible discussion questions here.

And dear readers, thank you for picking up my novel. I love hearing from you! Please tell your friends!

Purchase Cementville wherever books are sold:
Your local independent bookstore
Barnes and Noble
Amazon

Cementville can also be downloaded as an E-Book for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Apple iBook formats.