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Meredith Sue Willis
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Today isBiography
Born and raised in West Virginia, Meredith Sue Willis was educated in the public schools of Shinnston,
where her father was her science teacher. Her mother was also a part-time teacher, and all four of her aunts and uncles were teachers. Her paternal grandparents operated a country store; her maternal grandfather witnessed the Great Monongah mine explosion of 1907, in which hundreds of miners were killed, and her maternal grandmother was a mining camp midwife. Willis attended Bucknell University for two years, then spent a year as a Volunteer in Service to America (VISTA) in Norfolk, Virginia-- the subject of Only Great Changes (Scribner's 1985; Hamilton Stone Editions, 1997). After the year in VISTA, she returned to Barnard College in New York City where she was involved in work against the Vietnam War. She was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society and a participant in the 1968 Columbia University anti-war sit-ins, the subject of her novel Trespassers (Ham
ilton Stone Editions, 1997). She graduated from Barnard College Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude. After working as a recreation therapist for a year at Bellevue Hospital, she took a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University.
Her first published book was A Space Apart (Scribner's, 1979) followed by Higher Ground (Scribner's, 1981; Hamilton Stone Editions 1996) and Only Great Changes (Scribner's, 1985; Hamilton Stone Editions1997).In the early nineteen-seventies, she began to work as a writer-in-the-schools with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, one of the earliest of the arts-in-education organizations, and has continued to work as a w
riter-in-the-schools through various arts organizations, including Teachers & Writers and the New Jersey State Arts Council. She has given workshops and keynote addresses to teachers and students from Massachusetts to New York, New Jersey, Texas, and California.
Teachers & Writers publishes her books about writing and the teaching of writing: Personal Fiction Writing (1984; 2000), Blazing Pencils (1990), and Deep Revision (1993). Montemayor Press publishes her novels for children, including her recent Billie of Fish House Lane. Her other recent books include a novel, Oradell at Sea (West Virginia University Press 2002; paperback 2003), a collection of short stories, Dwight's House and Other Stories (Hamilton Stone Editions, 2004), and a science fiction novel for young adults, The City Built of Starships (Montemayor Press, 2004).
Meredith Sue Willis has won many prizes for her writing, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has participated in the Circuit Writers program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. Her writing about the Appalachian Region was the subject of the Fourteenth Annual Emory & Henry Literary Festival in Emory, Virginia, in 1995, and the proceedings of that festival were published in a special issue of The Iron Mountain Review (available from Box 64, Emory & Henry College, Emory, VA 24327). She was also the featured writer in the Fall, 2006 issue of Appalachian Heritage.
She has also received the Literary Award of the West Virginia Library Association and was the 1990 West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival Non-Italian Woman of the Year. In May 2004, she received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from West Virginia University. Willis now lives in New Jersey with her husband, Andrew B. Weinberger, a physician with a specialty in rheumatology. Their son Joel just graduated from Brown University. She is active in the Essex Ethical Culture Society and in anti-racism work through the South Orange-Maplewood Community Coaltion on Race. In her spare time, she tries to prove the Garden State is really that by keeping a four season organic garden in her backyard.
Photos above show Shinnston HIgh School (photo by Charlie Cowger ); MSW in 1969; a shot of student sit-ins at Columbia University in 1968; the Gang at Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 1977 (For names, click here.) ; MSW with her babyhood friend, former West Virginia University President David C. Hardesty in 2004; and an October 2007 picture of Sarah Zakowski, Joel Weinberger, Andy Weinberger, and MSW at the Mission Dolores, San Francisco.
Featured Book
If you order this month's featured book by direct mail, you may take 10% off your total order, excluding shipping & handling and tax. Order from the Order-by-Mail page.
A Space Apart
A Space Apart is so deftly and subtly written, I hardly noticed how involved I'd become until I'd read the last page and turned it, wanting more. The Scarlin family is going to be with me for a very long time. — Anne Tyler
Willis fleshes out with warmth and tenderness the omplexities of family love, which not only defines commitment but deepens the need. An important new talent. — The Kirkus Reviews
This is the story of a broken family trying to mend itself through three generations. It is a painful but essential process, and like all such repair jobs, it is only partly successful. Before it is over we come to know John and Vera and Mary Kay, as well as Vera's daughters, Lee and Tonie— to understand the wars they must declare and the peaces that they are able to proclaim within the state of being Scarlins. – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Willis views the Scarlin family ties and loyalties, limits and tensions, with realism, sensitivity and precision. A noteworthy first novel.
—Publisher's Weekly
Top row, left to right: , Bob Sievert, Phillip Lopate, Mark Solomon, Wesley Brown, RIchard Perry, Steve Schrader, Sylvia Sandovaal, Adalberto Ortiz; second row left to right, Glenda Adams; Laura Gilpin; front row, left to right, Teri Mack, Barbara Siegel, Nancy Larson Shapiro, Miguel Ortiz, Meredith Sue Willis, Karen Hubert.
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