Ali Liebegott – författare

Theo, our scruffy, big-hearted, and quick-witted heroine, is not so much down on her luck as delivered luckless into a culture where the winners and losers have already been decided. Her adventures in getting over take her from San Francisco to New York City, from dyke bars to telemarketing outfits, casinos to free clinics. With the signature poet''s voice that has won her awards and acclaim, Ali Liebegott investigates the conjoined hearts of hope and addiction in an unforgettable story of what it means to be young and broke in America.

" … frank, funny and painfully realistic … Liebegott has unleashed a book that’s part road novel, part portrait of a would-be artist as a young woman and part unabashed romance."—Josh Davis, The Rumpus

"Cha-Ching!, [Liebegott''s] latest novel, is one of those books that cause you to look up, blinking, realizing that you’ve read 75 pages and your coffee is cold. It’s a rush of offtrack betting, impulsive road trips, liquor-fueled make-out sessions, and the sort of low-end jobs that are invisible in most fiction but everywhere in Liebegott’s work."—San Francisco Magazine

"Cha-Ching! is a rush—the clatter of youth on the angry move, the rattling of dreamy gambles in crappy apartments, the desperate crash of falling for someone despite the million reasons why and the bang! bang! bang! of our tender hearts."—Daniel Handler, author of Why We Broke Up

"Cha-Ching! is so raw with need that I found myself itching that addict''s itch to chase the seemingly impossible."—Karolina Waclawiak, deputy editor of The Believer and author of How to Get Into the Twin Palms

"An open-hearted, deeply romantic story about a fucked-up dyke, her pit bull, her search for love, her tenuous grasp on hope, a pretty girl and the literal spin of the wheel."—Sarah Schulman, author of The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

"In the game of American-life-on-the-go hopscotch, Ali Liebegott''s heroine Theo just jumped a square ahead of Dean Moriarty … The author''s fine writing about gambling is as good as I ever read, including Dostoevski''s and the Barthelme Bros. In the end, love, in whatever twisted, pallid form, a love that has little to do with sexuality, is the only answer … Wonderful book."—Andrei Codrescu, author of So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems

"[Ali] Liebegott continues [her] winning streak with her third novel Cha-Ching!, tracing the life and times of compelling lead character Theo, a restless lesbian with a military hairstyle (which makes her gender-ambiguous enough to nickname herself "sirma''amsir") … There is a lot to relate to in Liebegott''s cleverly addictive novel. Readers will wonder what happens next to Theo and Cary Grant. Will the love she finds be everlasting, or will her addictions get the best of her? Theo is an engaging character, and she will linger in the imagination long after Cha-Ching!''s final page has been turned."—Jim Piechota, The Bay Area Reporter

Ali Liebegott is the author of the award-winning books The Beautifully Worthless and The IHOP Papers. In 2010 she took a train trip across America interviewing female poets for a project titled, The Heart Has Many Doors; excerpts from these interviews are posted monthly on The Believer Logger. Her novel Cha-Ching! is the third in the City Lights/Sister Spit series. In addition, she is the founding editor at Writers Among Artists whose first publication, Faggot Dinosaur, was released in 2012.

“An often-sweet, often-startling autobiographical novel-in-verse about going through a divorce and the death of a loved one—meditating on life’s big and small losses, and the ways the universe at once reminds us of and assuages those losses.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“A fierce, funny, agonized, cracked-open aria in homage to the presence and passing of fiercely loved things.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

how does a person dislodge the scenesthat burn inside them like arsoned cars?

Ali Liebegott is reeling from a fresh, painful divorce. She wallows in grief and overassigns meaning to everyday circumstance, clinging to an aging Dalmatian and obsessing over dead birds. Going through the motions of teaching and walking her dog, she eventually decides to hit the road: Ali and Rorschach at the Center of the World.

This autobiographical novel-in-verse is a chronicle of mourning and survival, documenting depression and picking apart failed intimacy. But Ali Liebegott’s poetry is laced with compassion, for herself and the reader and the world, as she learns to balance the sting of death with the tender strangeness of life.