About the Author
Katherine Williams majored in French and started doing spoken word in LA in 1994, and read at venues from NoHo’s Iguana Cafe to the College of Charleston. The slam winner and Pushcart nominee’s poems appear in Spillway, Projector, Diagram, Measure, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere.
A bigger picture:
Katherine Williams is a lapsed Existentialist who grew up mostly in South Carolina, where she hung on to art for dear life. That and surfing, which had been her goal since she laid eyes on two longboards in a friend’s yard when she was ten. Her parents disliked the beach, so she’d have to learn to drive first.
Navy life, mostly in Virginia, California, Europe, and South Carolina, had freed her family from two hard centuries in the deep South, so lean they barely even had lore. Almost freed. They lived in amazing places, but had to ship out every year or two, start at new schools in nearly every grade—and the boozy culture of the postwar Navy meant no adults were on board. Italy had three languages and art and fruit, and school was as magical as Hogwarts—but soon came Chesapeake. Again. And at the end lay Base Charleston, where Naval careers fetched up, and most brats were done moving. A century after the War, you could hardly buy garlic, and there was nothing to do but get wasted and wrap your car around a tree on Hwy 61.
But Folly Beach had waves, and surfing meant freedom from treading the earth. There was a college, so when high school became unbearable she enrolled, at sixteen. In Summer English she learned how Milton, Yeats, Joyce, Browning, and Millay had been artists. She wasn't ready for college but, having nothing better to do, she went, and got chewed up and spat out. She did drugs. She had sex. Her first friend at school was Dmetria, a Black girl she knew in English class. She kept surfing. On the beaches of NC and FL she got chewed up and spat out more. She gave as good as she got. She liked to surf. She had never learned to study. When she was seventeen, her little sister was killed by a car. Three years later her mother died. She stopped surfing and got serious about school. She majored in French because they didn't offer Italian or surfing. French was universal, and wouldn't force her to specialize before she figured things out. Plus it was like reading, only harder. She liked Baudelaire's prose poems, and du Mauriac.
She liked working in restaurants. She ran the movie program for the Student Government Association her last year, and discovered film could be an art form too. She volunteered at the central production office during the international performing arts festival. She got hired on to manage the Sullivan’s Island Arts Council incorporation, and then clerked for a year at the Gibbes Museum.
Dissatisfied and still grieving for her family and probably her surfing life, she went wandering. In France she rode the trains, and after selling her surfboard in Biarritz, thumbed across the Pyrenees with an Australian. She had no thoughts of her own yet, which freed her to translate conversations between her companion and the Frenchmen who kindly drove. The Iranian hostage crisis was on everyone's minds. She learned that history was more than the dates and places of men's crimes against civilization. She learned the fundamentals of Western politics, how to tell labor versus liberal, the nature of propaganda, and that the European Theatre was not quite what she'd thought. All this just by translating southern French to slangy Australian and back.
Back home, she’d become interested in chemistry, and enrolled once again at the College of Charleston to learn physics, chemistry, and biology. The political world was starting to make sense, and now the miraculous physical world started making sense. She volunteered in the neurology lab of Gary Landreth, studying cell signaling cascades. The complex handiwork suited her, and her coworkers were witty, progressive, and cosmopolitan. This would do if she couldn’t find a path to art.
Williams married and moved to King/Drew Medical Center in South Central Los Angeles in 1985, at the height of the gang war between the Crips and the Bloods. She found an art conservator who advised her not to do it if she needed to make a living. So she joined the lab of one of Gary’s colleagues at UCLA Medical Center, building on their previous cell signaling studies. She took painting classes and cello lessons, and wrote a handbook to help KDMC interns adapt to life in America’s toughest neighborhood.
She found surfing in Southern California mostly crowded, lonesome, gloomy, and liable to make a person sick. She enjoyed teaching friends Irene and Colette the basics in the raggedy Westside morning conditions. On vacay in Hawai’i, she found a left-hander breaking smallish everyday on a south-facing reef. If that break was the joy of her second summer out West, returning to SoCal was the unbearable letdown.
She continued in biomedicine, living her dream as a bench-level scientist in coral microbial ecology
she moved back home to James Island, SC, twenty years ago with poet Richard Garcia.
and with Richard established the Long Table Poets, an ongoing workshop for study, writing, and critique.
She has published three chap books and read at venues from the LA Art District to the College of Charleston. The Pushcart nominee’s poems appear in Spillway, Projector, Diagram, Measure, SC Review, and elsewhere.
In Charleston she is a community arts advocate who produced occasional readings in Los Angeles, volunteered for the UCLA/Lennox education partnership. She served on the board of The Poetry Society of SC, where she was awarded a SouthArts grant for the Warrior Poets Series, presenting eminent poets in readings and workshops at Charleston’s downtown VA Medical Center.
She spearheaded the James Island Arts Council, and founded Poetry at McLeod. where 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.
Katherine Williams (B.A. 1978, French, The College of Charleston) is a Pushcart and Best of the Web nominee with poems in Spillway, South Carolina Review, Projector, Measure, Diagram, and elsewhere. She has published three chap books and read at venues from the L.A. Poetry Festival to the College of Charleston. She studied poetry with Richard Garcia’s Long Table Poets for twenty years, and her first poetry collection, The Devil Cruises Pacific Coast Highway, was published by Kelsay Books in June 2023.
Williams was a career bench-scientist at UCLA Medical Center, Hollings Marine Laboratories, and the Medical University of SC; an Apple-certified technician; a college chemistry tutor; a website developer; and a graphic artist. As a grant writer for The Poetry Society of SC, she created the Warrior Poets Series for the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center. Later she founded Poetry at McLeod, seeking to illuminate the experience and legacy of plantation life from enslavement from to ascendancy through Black poetry; and James Island Arts Council, supporting arts education at all levels.
photo: Jimmy Dowds2023, The Soapbox at Chico Feo
photo: JJ Lundy2015, Charleston Library Society
photo: author 2004, Venice CA
photo: Cecilia Woloch2001, Idyllwild Poetry Festival
photo: Erzsebet Csendesi1994, Lothar’s house, Venice