Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek Valley, a segregated working-class neighborhood of St. Louis that was razed in 1959 to build a highway, an act of racism disguised under urban renewal as "progress." The three rooms of her childhood home was heated by a wood-burning stove; her family had no hot water, but what Gibson lacked in material comforts she made up for in imagination.

A moving memoir of family life at a time very different from the present. The Last Children of Mill Creek chronicles the everyday lived experiences of Gibson's large family--her seven siblings, her crafty, college-educated mother, and hard-working father--and the friends, shop owners, church ladies, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit African-American community. 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 chronicles the extraordinary lives of ordinary people."

She started writing short stories about her childhood memories after retiring at age sixty-six. Her work has been produced as part of 50in50: Writing Women into Existence, at the Billie Holliday Theater in Brooklyn, and published in The St. Louis Anthology (Belt Publishing, 2019.) She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.