Joy Williams

Joy Williams (born February 11, 1944) is an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Her notable works of fiction include State of Grace, The Changeling, and Harrow. Williams has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, a Rea Award for the Short Story, a Kirkus Award for Fiction, and a Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Early life and education Williams was born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. She grew up in Maine and was an only child. Her father was a Congregational minister with a church in Portland, Maine, and her grandfather was a Welsh Baptist minister. She received a BA from Marietta College and a MFA from the University of Iowa. At Iowa, Williams studied alongside Raymond Carver, R.V. Cassill, Vance Bourjaily, and Richard Yates. After graduating from Iowa, she married and moved to Florida, where she had a dog, a beach, and a Jaguar XK150, and wrote her first novel, State of Grace. Williams has taught creative writing at the University of Houston, the University of Florida, the University of Iowa, and the University of Arizona. For the 2008-09 academic year, Williams was the writer-in-residence at the University of Wyoming, and she continued thereafter as an affiliated faculty member of the English department. She lives in Key West, Florida, and Tucson, Arizona.