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Paige Williams is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has written about, among other things, suburban politics in Detroit, the death penalty in Alabama, paleoanthropology in South Africa, and the theft of cultural palimony from the Tlingit peoples of Alaska.

She won the 2008 National Magazine Award for feature writing, for the Atlanta magazine piece “You Have Thousands of Angels around You,” about a young Burundian asylum seeker who found refuge in America. In 2009, while executive editor of Atlanta magazine, she was a finalist, with the rest of the editorial staff, for “King: 40 Years Later;” the deeply reported package, spearheaded by editor in chief Rebecca Burns, covered the unfulfilled legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and included Williams’s “Poverty by the Numbers” and “30318,” an eleven-page feature about the unyielding poverty facing a multitude of Atlantans. In 2011, she was a finalist for a two-part reported essay, in O: The Oprah Magazine, on women’s health. Her journalism has been anthologized in multiple volumes of the Best American series, including twice in The Best American Magazine Writing and twice in The Best American Crime Writing. In 2010, on this website, she self-published “Finding Dolly Freed,” about a woman who, in 1978, at age eighteen, published a cult-classic book called Possum Living, on “living frugally and happily,” and who worked for NASA as an aerospace engineer before vanishing from the public consciousness; the “Radiohead journalism” project, an independent experiment in crowd-funded longform narrative and “a la carte” online journalism, was covered by the Columbia Journalism Review, NPR’s “On the Media,” Mother Jones, Jezebel, and Wired.

Williams has taught longform narrative, investigative reporting, news reporting, features writing, and literary criticism at New York University, the University of Pittsburgh, Emory, the University of Mississippi, the Missouri School of Journalism, and Harvard, among others, and in the Knight Science Journalism program at M.I.T. She is now the Laventhol/Newsday Visiting Associate Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, in New York.

Williams was born in Oxford, Mississippi, grew up in Tupelo, and graduated from Ole Miss with a degree in journalism. Before magazines, she spent over a decade at newspapers including the Washington Post and the Charlotte Observer, where her investigative subjects included lax, dysfunctional government oversight of Carolinas nursing homes and the foster care system. Her features and investigative work annually won honors that included the statewide Thomas Wolfe Award and, nationally, the inaugural Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. She has been a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Nevada Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism and was a 1996-97 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. She has also been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, where she worked on The Dinosaur Artist, a work of nonfiction to be published by Hachette Books in September 2018. Williams holds an MFA from Columbia University and, usually, a gigantic cup of coffee.