Bio
I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin, a product of the same Midwestern favelas that fostered Joseph McCarthy, Harry Houdini, and actor Willem Dafoe, with whom I once performed in children's theatre.
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My life as a writer began when I was in second grade at St. Therese Catholic School. Sister Phyllis Mae, a Franciscan nun, was my teacher. She was exceptionally strict and wore a full black habit, so all we ever really saw of her was part of her face and her hands when she wrote on the chalkboard. As a seven-year-old, I found her terrifying. Yet she was the first person to encourage my writing. She saw something in one of my colored-pencil stories of anthropomorphized vegetables that inspired her to steer me like a pond yacht from classroom to classroom, reading my story aloud to, eventually, the entire school. I am not certain what effect this may have had on my developing psyche, but I do know that, ever since, writing has offered me equal parts terror and satisfaction. Thank you, Sister Phyllis Mae.
AUTHOR BIO
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Tara Williams earned her MFA in Creative Writing Fiction at Fresno State University. She also holds a masters and doctorate in education. Currently she teaches English at a community college.
Before writing fiction, she wrote informative books and articles, essays, and screenplays. Her literary work has appeared in Southwest Review, Entropy, Sky Island Journal, and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, among other publications, and in the climate fiction anthology Fire & Water: Stories of the Anthropocene (2021 Black Lawrence Press). Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net, and an excerpt from her novel-in-progress won an honorable mention from the Plentitudes Prize.
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Tara's writing has been supported by fellowships from Writers in Paradise, where she workshopped with novelists Ann Hood and Andre Dubus III, as well as Fishtrap Gathering of Writers, where she workshopped with author Leni Zumas.
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When not writing or teaching, she hangs out with family, travels, gardens, searches for Bigfoot, and fashions fantastical objects out of clay.
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Publications & Awards
My climate fiction fairy tale, "The Ice Child," appears in this anthology from Black Lawrence Press (2021).
"White Flag," an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, won an Honorable Mention in the 2024 Plentitudes Prizes.
"In the Forest," an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, was honored with a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nomination from Fatal Flaw's amazing editors.
The audio version of my short story "My Beautiful Corpse" won 2nd place in Slippery Elm's Deanna Tulley Multimedia Contest.
My flash fiction "The Last Mr. Tefertiller" appears here. Keep scrolling down till you find me!
My photograph "Henry Miller's Piano," along with a brief description of the story behind it, appears in Vol. 33:3.
"My Beautiful Corpse" was first published in The Weird Reader Vol. III, along with several of my photographs.
"World Cry," my first short story publication, was in the inaugural issue of Apparition, whose editors also honored the story with a Pushcart Prize nomination.
My essay "Violent Femmes: A Triptych" appeared in Vol. 103, No. 4.
