Alison Owings


Alison Owings is an American oral historian, journalist, and author. She is the author of Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich, Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray, Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans, and Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour's Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco. Her work has been published by Rutgers University Press, the University of California Press, Heyday, and Beacon Press, and has been reviewed in outlets including The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Early life and education

Owings was born in Pasadena, California and grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. She studied in Germany at University of Freiburg from 1964 to 1965 and earned a bachelor’s degree from American University in Washington, D.C., in 1966.

Career

Owings's work often centers on communities whose voices are less represented in mainstream histories. Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich collected first-person accounts from German women during the Nazi era. She later published Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray, based on interviews with waitresses across the United States.
Her book Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans presented oral histories from Native Americans in [the United States|Native American] men and women across the country.
In 2024, Beacon Press published Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour's Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco, a biography of San Francisco community leader Del Seymour that recounts his experiences with homelessness in the Tenderloin and his founding of Code Tenderloin, a nonprofit offering job readiness programs in the city. Mayor of the Tenderloin was reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, which described it as “a richly satisfying tapestry” of Seymour’s life and the neighborhood. Booklist called it “a memorable biography” and noted that it “proves to be both entertaining and life-affirming.”

Selected works