Biography
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 (Hamilton 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 recent fiction includes a novel, Oradell at Sea (West Virginia University Press 2002), 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) as well as Out of the Mountains (Ohio University Press 2010) and Re-Visions: Stories from Stories (Hamilton Stone Editions, 2011).
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 & enry 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.
MSW 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. Right: MSW with then-president of WVU, David C. Hardesty, her earliest friend!
Willis now lives in New Jersey with her husband, Andrew B. Weinberger, a physician with a specialty in rheumatology. Their son Joel, a graduate of Brown University, is working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Berkeley, where he lives with his wife, also a graduate student, Sarah Zakowski Weinberger.
MSW 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.
Her newest books are Out of the Mountains, a new collection of Appalachian stories, Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel, a book on how to start and write your novel., and Re-Visions: Stories from Stories, another collection, this time of spinoffs of myths and other stories.
Joel and Sarah got married! May 30, 2010
Unlabeled photos above show Shinnston High School (photo by Charlie Cowger ); MSW at Andy Weinberger's graduation from NYU Medical School in 1970; a shot of student sit-ins at Columbia University in 1968; the gang at Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 1977; MSW MSW & Maggie Anderson in "Close Harmonies," a program of Appalachian readings, music, and dancing, at the Manhattan Theater Club in 1983; an October 2007 picture of Sarah Zakowski (Joel's then fiancee), Joel Weinberger, Andy Weinberger, and MSW at the Mission Dolores in San Francisco; and a photo of Joel and Sarah getting married on May 30, 2010!
Click here for some pix of MSW as a college student.
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Special Price on Meredith Sue Willis's new book of stories from myths and other stories: Re-Visions. Regular Price $14.95 plus S&H now $13.00 plus S&H.
Click on the Book or here.Re-visions: Stories from Stories is a collection of spin-offs from myth, fiction, and the Bible. From a new look at Adam and Eve and why they left the Garden to a grown-up Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin to the confessions of SaintAugustine's concubine- each story offers a gloss on the original as well as insights into how we canlive today.
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