Susan Millar Williams grew up in Stuttgart, Arkansas, fifty miles southeast of Little Rock in the rice-growing region of the state.  She was educated at Hendrix College, the University of Arkansas, and Louisiana State University, where she earned a PhD in English literature.

Her biography of Julia Peterkin, the first Southern writer to win a Pultizer Prize for fiction, won the 1998 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, given by the Association of Southern Women Historians for the best book of the year in Southern women’s history. A Devil and a Good Woman, Too: The Lives of Julia Peterkin (University of Georgia Press, 1997) will be the basis for “Miss Julia,” a documentary currently being produced by SCETV.

She has also written for The Nation, The Southern Review, and The Women’s Review of Books, and has contributed forewords to Gullah Folktales of the Georgia Coast and the Brown Thrasher edition of Julia Peterkin’s Black April.  In 2002 she was awarded a fellowship in writing by the South Carolina Arts Commission. She served as a humanities consultant to the Scribbling Women project, which produces radio scripts based on stories by American women. Visit that website at http://www.scribblingwomen.org/ . Williams served on the editorial board for The South Carolina Encyclopedia and in 2007 was the featured speaker at the Pickens-Salley Symposium on Southern Women held at U.S.C. Aiken.  

As director of the McClellanville Arts Council, Williams edited The McClellanville Coast Cookbook and The McClellanville Coast Seafood Cookbook, both of which won Tabasco Community Cookbook awards. With co-author Stephen Hoffius, she is currently at work on a nonfiction book about the great Charleston earthquake of 1886, a gripping tale of disaster and murder that unfolds amid the deepening crisis of segregation and Jim Crow.

Dr. Williams teaches American literature, composition, and creative writing. More information and excerpts from her work can be found at http://www.southernartistry.org/