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Life might not begin at 40, but for Wilmington Friends School graduate Zach Williams (’02), this milestone marked the moment he achieved his longtime goal of becoming an acclaimed fiction writer.
Six years ago, Williams was amid a 12-year stint teaching young students in New York City and working on a collection of short stories. This past summer, he published his first book, “Beautiful Days,” a short-story collection issued by Penguin Random House. Now, his fiction is being published in such top literary outlets as “The New Yorker” and “Paris Review.” He’s also teaching creative writing at Stanford University in California.
“It’s been a bit of a whirlwind, a roller coaster,” Williams says. “To top it all off, ‘Beautiful Days’ was listed on President Obama’s annual summer reading list. I was like, ‘Whoa! What happened?’”
When Williams graduated from Johns Hopkins University, he wanted to be a fiction writer. “[I] was encouraged by my high school teachers, but I felt I hadn’t lived enough yet—I had nothing to say,” he admits. After a brief stint in Hollywood as a film intern, he moved to New York and taught English at the middle and high school levels. “Gradually, I started to get story ideas and started to get back into writing.”
He enrolled in the MFA program at New York University, where he won the prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford for creative writing. He packed up his family—Williams is married with two children—and headed west.
“Beautiful Days” snagged a rave review by the chief literary critic at “The New York Times,” Dwight Garner, who termed the tales “psychological horror” stories. “I prefer to think of them as social science fiction,” Williams laughs.
What’s up next? “Not a novel yet,” Williams muses. “But I do have four ideas that are knocking around, and some of them may demand something longer,” he says. “But basically, after the book, I’m back at square one.”
Find “Beautiful Days” on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
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