Don Williams

Pictured on a recent trip to New York City with Williams' sister Kathleen and niece Rebecca Rose.

Don Williams, News-Sentinel columnist, short story writer, and editor and publisher of New Millennium Writings, is a founding member of the Knoxville Writers Guild, which he served for its first five years as program chair. He lives in Sevier County with his wife, Jeanne Tredup, a special education teacher. They have three children. He teaches a writing course sponsored by New Millennium Writings at Christ Chapel, one block north of Laurel Theater, in Fort Sanders.

His journalism has appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country, including Poets & Writers and Writers Digest and has been reprinted in college texts, including Writers Inc: Sourcebook (1995, Write Source Educational Publishing, Burlington, Wisc.). A recent News-Sentinel readers survey listed his Friday column as the most frequently read among some 20 weekly personal columns in the newspaper. Selected past columns may be read online at www.newmillenniumwritings.com.

His fiction has been published in The Crescent Review Tenth Anniversary Special Issue (Winston-Salem, 1992), the anthologies Voices from the Valley (1994, Knoxville Writers Guild), Christmas Blues (1995, Amador Press, Albuquerque), Homeworks (1996, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville), A  Tennessee Landscape, People and Places (1996, Tennessee Writers Alliance), Breathing the Same Air  (2000, Celtic Cat Publishing and KWG) and New Millennium Writings, among others. He wrote the preface to All Around Us: Poems from the Valley (1996, Emerald House, KWG). He is listed in the 2001-2002 edition of A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers, a publication of Poets & Writers. He was selected by USAToday.com to anchor an edition of Youre the Author, an interactive group-writing feature, and his offering may be read at www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/series.htm.   He is putting finishing touches on his novel manuscript about East Tennessee with the working title, GreatMountains Burning, in preparation for finding a publisher and submitting to contests.

As a full-time feature writer at The Knoxville News- Sentinel from 1985 to 1995, he won a National Endowment for the Humanities / University of Michigan Journalism Fellowship, and the Malcolm Law Award. His feature articles won first place prizes from the University of Tennessee, Tennessee Press Association and the Associated Press Managing Editors, as well as the Golden Press Card Award (best of show, all-media), the top honor bestowed by the East Tennessee Sigma Delta Chi Society of Professional Journalists. He also won the society's first place awards for  columns and features several times. He previously worked as assistant news-editor for The Mountain Press, in Sevierville.

As a reporter Williams gained a wide variety of experiences from which he has drawn as a writer. He has participated in military exercises, rafted down Class IV rivers, experienced flight in hot air balloons, glider planes, helicopters and more. He has spelunked, bungee jumped, hiked across the Great Smoky Mountains, accompanied a blind man to Russia, lived on the streets, chronicled writer and actor Libba Moore Grays mortal battle against metastatic breast cancer. Hes interviewed murderers, victims of child abuse, schizophrenics, drug addicts, the homeless, as well as actors, presidential candidates and 10 of the 12 astronauts who walked on the moon.

His essays, interviews and profiles of writers, including John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, Lee Smith, Wilma Dykeman, William Kennedy, Marilyn Kallet, Leslie Garrett, Walker Percy, David Hunter, Ken Kesey, Jon Manchip White, Robert Penn Warren, Larry Brown, Libba Moore Gray, David Madden, Nikki Giovanni, Allen Wier, Nicholas Delbanco and others have appeared in The News- Sentinel as well as national publications.

As founder of New Messenger Writing & Publishing, he designed, edited and published 17 books, including How to Get Heat Without Fire, by poet Marilyn Kallet (head of the University of Tennessee Creative Writing program); The Archangel Caper and When Puppy Love Became A Howling Dog, by columnist and novelist David Hunter; and 11 issues of New Millennium Writings.

His hobbies include running, acting and (most recently) learning to play the guitar.