Katherine Williams is a white Southerner who grew up in the military, mostly in Virginia, California, and South Carolina. She has published four chap books and read at venues from the L.A. Arts District to the College of Charleston. The Pushcart nominee’s poems appear in Spillway, Projector, Diagram, Measure, SC Review, and elsewhere. A UCLA biomedical research technician, she moved back home to James Island, SC, twenty years ago with poet Richard Garcia.
There she continued in biomedicine, and with Richard established the Long Table Poets, an ongoing workshop for study, writing, and critique. Writing poetry centers her, and helps her think more deeply; her calling came in 1991, the day after attending a reading with Luis Alfaro at Self Help Graphics in East L.A. and witnessing the energy poetry could create among strangers.
Williams is a community arts advocate who produced occasional readings in Los Angeles, spearheaded the James Island Arts Council, and founded Poetry at McLeod, a series in which illustrious Black poets present their art at a Southern cotton plantation now dedicated to researching and honoring the lives of people who were enslaved there. Her hobbies include surfing, art, politics, playing the cello, fixing computers, and homemaking.
Paperback: 112 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (July 10, 2023)