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 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.
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 aboard. Italy had three languages, art, fruit, a volcano, 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.
Meanwhile, high school was unbearable, so she bailed. In Summer English she learned how Milton, Yeats, Joyce, Browning, and Millay had been artists. Though not ready for college, she went, was chewed up, and spat out. She did drugs. She had sex. 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 liked school but was not much of a student. vWhen she was seventeen, death started coming. Her sister was the first. Three years later her mother. She stopped surfing and got serious about school. She did French because they didn't offer Italian or surfing. French was universal, and wouldn't force her to choose. It was like reading, only harder. She liked Baudelaire's prose poems, and the Existentialists. She liked waiting tables. She ran the students’ movie theater, and saw film as an art form. Her final summer she goferred at the performing arts festival’s production office. She went to New York and saw that a city could be an art form. She got hired on to manage the Sullivan’s Island Arts Council incorporation, and then clerked for a year at the Gibbes Museum. Those last two were mundane.
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 gave us lifts. 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 got interested in art conservation, and enrolled again in college to study science and art history. Political affairs had started making sense, and now life started making sense. In Gary’s neurology lab she studied cell signaling cascades. The complex and exacting handiwork suited her, and her coworkers were brainy, progressive, and cosmopolitan. This would do if art was impossible.
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 lunched with an art conservator who said his profession was mundane. Science would have to do. At UCLA Medical Center, she continued cell signaling studies with a colleague of Gary’s. She took painting classes and cello lessons, and wrote a handbook to help KDMC newcomers adapt to life in America’s toughest neighborhood.
Surfing in Southern California was crowded, lonesome, gloomy, and caused infections. 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. Onward she treaded the amazing outskirts of biomedical research. Then poetry found her at an electrifying reading in East LA, and everything fit.
She has published three chap books and a collection, and read at venues from the LA Poetry Festival Gala 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, spearheaded the James Island Arts Council, and founded Poetry at McLeod. where illustrious Black poets present their art at a Southern cotton plantation where the lives of people who were enslaved there are now honored.
She still surfs.
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