About Joy Williams (American writer)
Joy Williams (born February 11, 1944) is an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Best-known for her short fiction, she is also the author of novels including State of Grace, The Quick and the Dead, and Harrow. Williams has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, a Rea Award for the Short Story, a Kirkus Award for Fiction, and a Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. == Early life and education == Williams was born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. She grew up in Maine and was an only child. Her father was a Congregational minister with a church in Portland, Maine, and her grandfather was a Welsh Baptist minister. She received a BA from Marietta College and a MFA from the University of Iowa. At Iowa, Williams studied alongside Raymond Carver, Ronald Verlin Cassill, Vance Bourjaily, and Richard Yates. After graduating from Iowa, she married and moved to Florida, where she had a dog, a beach, and a Jaguar XK150. She wrote her first novel, State of Grace.
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