Background

Theresa Williams was born on January 24, 1956, in California, United States. She spent most of her childhood in Jacksonville, North Carolina near the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base.

Education

In 1974 Theresa Williams graduated from Jacksonville High School. In 1985 she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from East Carolina University. In 1987 she received a Master of Arts degree from this university. Her master’s thesis was titled From X to I: The Evolution of Salinger's Narrative Method and focused on the short fiction of J. D. Salinger. In 1989 Williams obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from Bowling Green State University. Her M.F.A. thesis, titled The Gift of Healing, reflects Williams’s concern with tragedy, healing, and survival.

Career

Theresa Williams’s first novel is The Secret of Hurricanes (2002). The narrator, Pearl Starling, is an iconoclastic, forty-five-year-old hermit who makes her living weaving rugs. Pregnant, her condition is the gossip of her small North Carolina town. Despite the curiosity of the townspeople, the Pentecostal missionaries who make daily visits to try to bring her back into the fold, and the shadow of her own harrowing past, Pearl lovingly, patiently waits for her child to appear, all the while studiously guarding the identity of the child’s father.

Her short stories have appeared in The Sun, Hunger Mountain, and other magazines, and poems in a number of magazines, including Gargoyle, DMQ Review, Paterson Literary Review, Lilliput Review, Barnwood International Poetry Magazine, Apple Valley Review. Her chapbook, The Galaxy to Ourselves, was published in 2012. She is the creator of The Letter Project, an online repository for actual letters–written and sent.

Achievements

• Theresa Williams is best known as the author of The Secret of Hurricanes. She is the recipient of an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Her novel, The Secret of Hurricanes was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Secret of Hurricanes

    (Pearl Starling is forty-five, a hermit with a "colorful p...)

    2002
  • The Galaxy to Ourselves

    (The Galaxy to Ourselves is a poetry chapbook.)

    2012

Views

Theresa Williams counts James Wright and Theodore Roethke as major influences.

Interests

• Writers

  James Wright, Theodore Roethke

Connections

In 1974 Theresa Williams married Charles Allen Williams. They have three sons.

Spouse:

Charles Allen Williams

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2011
• The Page of Theresa Williams on Facebook