Sonya Lea is an American Canadian writer and writing mentor. Her book, American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture (University Press of Kentucky, October 2025) is about the last public execution in America, a “legal lynching” in Owensboro, Kentucky, where she was born. Her memoir Wondering Who You Are (Tin House, 2015,) about her partner’s memory loss and its impact on her relationship, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and has won awards and garnered praise in a number of publications including Oprah Magazine, People, and the BBC, who named it a “top ten book.” Her essays have appeared in Salon, The Southern Review, Brevity, Guernica, Ms. Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Rumpus, and more. She teaches in Canada and the US and developed a pilot project to teach writing to women veterans through Tom Skerritt’s Red Badge Project. She is the recipient of an Artist Trust Award, two Canada Council Awards, and a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and adult children.

"In American Bloodlines, Sonya Lea confronts America’s history of racial terror and the enduring legacy of lynch culture. This searing and necessary book serves as an essential act of reckoning and remembrance, urging us to face the difficult truths that shape our past, present, and future with clarity and humility."—Lacy M. Johnson, The Reckonings, Essays on Justice for the Twenty-First Century

“In American Bloodlines, Sonya Lea reveals the ways that whiteness harms through an exhaustive, often vulnerable, excavation of her privilege and learned racism. She illustrates the hatred animated in her ancestry with a courageous sobriety that emerges through countless interviews, poignant recollections, and meticulous research. The result is an engaging blueprint for the repair of self and one's community from an underexplored perspective. American Bloodlines is required reading for all those still uncertain about the murderous outcomes of white supremacy and for all those who yearn to heal.”—Irvin Weathersby Jr., In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space