Rynn Williams

Born in New York City, Rynn Williams began writing early on. Mrs. Carey, her fifth grade teacher, accused her of plagiarizing "Worm," her poem for the class newspaper. Issues with authority ensued.

Williams began to publish in small literary magazines as an undergraduate journalism major at New York University. She worked as a writer (both on-staff and freelance) for about 15 years.

She took a Master's Degree in English, also at NYU, in 1990. In 2001, after the birth of Beckett, her third child, Williams went back to school -- this time to Warren Wilson’s low residency MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, North Carolina.

She continued to publish. Williams’s work has been featured in The Nation, Massachusetts Review, Field, Agni Online, New York Quarterly, and North American Review, among other journals. In 2001 she received a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.

Adonis Garage was selected for the 2004 Prairie Schooner Book Award for Poetry and was published by The University of Nebraska Press. Poet Mark Doty, whose book My Alexandria won the National Book Critics Circle Award, says, "You couldn't ask for a more articulate ars poetica. Williams beats out of difficulty and gorgeousness her own lyrics of pleasure and fury, in poems that sing and lament a fierce urban matrix, where there's ‘Mary-rage in the off-duty taxicabs, but God bless/ the satin of born-again swagger.’ Assured and vulnerable, passionate and undeceived, Adonis Garage is a thrilling debut."

Rynn Williams is an Adjunct Professor of English at Bloomfield College in Bloomfield, New Jersey. She lives in Brooklyn.