The Loneliness Files (Tin House 2023)
What does it mean to be a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of an online world? In our age of digital hyper-connection, Athena Dixon invites us to consider this question with depth, heart, and ferocity, investigating the gaps that technology cannot fill and confronting a lifetime of loneliness.
Living alone as a middle-aged woman without children or pets and working forty hours a week from home, more than three hundred and fifty miles from her family and friends, Dixon begins watching mystery videos on YouTube, listening to true crime podcasts, and playing video game walk-throughs just to hear another human voice. She discovers the story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who died alone, her body remaining in front of a glowing television set for three years before the world finally noticed. Searching for connection, Dixon plumbs the depths of communal loneliness, asking essential questions of herself and all of us: How had her past decisions left her so alone? Are we, as humans, linked by a shared loneliness? How do we see the world and our place in it? And finally, how do we find our way back to each other?
Searing and searching, The Loneliness Files is a groundbreaking memoir in essays that ultimately brings us together in its piercing, revelatory examination of how and why it is that we break apart.
The Incredible Shrinking Woman (Split/Lip Press 2020)
A quiet retelling of a life in the background, Athena Dixon’s debut essay collection,
The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is a gentle unpacking of the roles she learned to inhabit, growing up as a Black woman in a small Midwestern town, to avoid disruption. But after the implosion of the life she’d always wanted, Dixon must explore the implications of her desire to hide as she rebuilds herself in a world that expects freedom to look boisterous.
As Dixon presses the bruises of her invisibility, these essays glide between the pages of fan fiction, the rush of new panties, down the rabbit hole of depression, and reemerge on the other side, speaking with the lived authority of a voice that, even when shaking, is always crystal clear.
No God In This Room (Argus House Press 2018, Out of Print)
Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books 2018)
Black Girl Magic continues and deepens the work of the first BreakBeat Poets anthology by focusing on some of the most exciting Black women writing today. This anthology breaks up the myth of hip-hop as a boys’ club, and asserts the truth that the cypher is a feminine form.
Getting to the Truth: The Craft and Practice of Creative Non-Fiction (Hippocampus Books 2021)
Learn how to write creative nonfiction alongside some of the brightest minds in the genre.
Inspired by Hippocampus Magazine’s annual conference, Getting to the Truth: The Craft and Practice of Creative Nonfiction features 20+ essays from some of the event’s highest-rated speakers and writers behind a few of our journal’s most-read craft columns.
Getting to the Truth is full of real-world insight, practical examples, and even creative nonfiction writing exercises and other prompts. Whether you’re new to writing creative nonfiction, want to experiment with new forms of storytelling, or wish to improve your craft, there’s something within these pages that will ignite your creativity.
Craft Essays
On Writing The Incredible Shrinking Woman (Mom Egg Review)
Doubt by Any Other Name: Thoughts on Impostor Syndrome
Awards and Nominations
Finalist, Gordon Square Review Prose Contest, 2018
Winner of the Intersectional Midwest Chapbook Contest, Argus House Press, 2018
2nd Place Prose, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Voices of Color Fellowship, 2021
Tin House 2nd Book Residency, Fall 2021
Selected Publications
My Rom Com Miseducation- Harper’s Bazaar
What is it Really Like in a Sensory Deprivation Tank-Lit Hub
What to Read When You Want to Find Home-The Rumpus
