Vivian Gibson was raised on Bernard Street in Mill Creek Valley, 454 acres in downtown St. Louis which comprised the nation’s largest urban-renewal project beginning in 1959. She started writing short stories about her childhood memories of the dying community after retiring at age sixty-six. Her memoir, The Last Children of Mill Creek (Belt Publishing, 2020), published when she was seventy, won the Missouri Humanities Council 2021 Literary Achievement Award. Her work also appears in St. Louis Anthology (Belt Publishing, 2019) and Plough Quarterly Magazine (2020). Also in 2020, Gibson was featured in Poets & Writers Magazine’s Annual 5 Over 50. Her work was produced as part of 50in50: Writing Women into Existence, at the Billie Holliday Theater in Brooklyn, NY (2018). In Gibson’s words, “This memoir is about survival, as told from the viewpoint of a watchful young girl – a collection of decidedly universal stories that chronicle the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.”
