Alison Owings

Alison Owings (born June 17, 1944

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 (Rutgers University Press, 1993) 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 (University of California Press, 2002), based on interviews with waitresses across the United States.

Her book Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans (Rutgers University Press, 2011) presented oral histories from 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”

Selected works

The Wander Woman's Phrasebook: How to Meet or Avoid People in Three Romance Languages. Shameless Hussey Press, 1987. . Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich. Rutgers University Press, 1993. . Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray. University of California Press, 2002. . Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans. Rutgers University Press, 2011. . Mayor of the Tenderloin. Beacon Press, 2024. .