Erika J. Simpson, author of the memoir This Is Your Mother, is a recent transplant to Denver after spending her life in the South. She received her MFA from the University of Kentucky and received the 2021 MFA Award in Nonfiction. Her essay “If You Ever Find Yourself” was published in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity and featured in Best American Essays 2022.
Her memoir is a powerful reckoning with legacy, loss, and the shifting terrain between mother and daughter. Through scripture-steeped memories and raw reflections, Erika Simpson traces her mother’s mythic resilience and the moment it gave way to mortality. In peeling back the layers of her mother’s story, she uncovers her own.
We asked her to answer our recurring My Reading Life questionnaire so readers could get to know her, and the books that shaped her life, better.
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