UM Alumna Joins Writing Staff of The New Yorker

Paige Williams, a graduate of the Department of Journalism at the University of Mississippi, has joined The New Yorker magazine as a staff writer. She will also continue as an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Paige Williams
Photo Courtesy of The Meek School of Journalism and New Media

Williams has written for The New Yorker previously. She won the National Magazine Award for feature writing in 2008 and was a finalist in 2009 (shared) and 2011. Her stories have been anthologized in five volumes of the Best American series, including The Best American Magazine Writing (2011, 2009) and The Best American Crime Writing (2006, 2003).

In January 2010, she self-published “Finding Dolly Freed,” an independent experiment in crowd-funded long-form narrative; the “Radiohead journalism” project, which encouraged voluntary reader support via PayPal, was an early exploration of a la carte online journalism that was covered by the Columbia Journalism Review, NPR’s “On the Media,” Mother Jones, Wired, and others.

Williams has written for a range of publications, including Smithsonian, GQ, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and has taught narrative, investigative, news reporting, features writing and literary criticism at universities including Harvard, M.I.T., New York University, the University of Pittsburgh, Emory, and the University of Mississippi.

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. From 2010 to 2014 she taught narrative nonfiction at the Nieman Foundation and edited Nieman Storyboard, the Nieman’s Foundation online magazine on storytelling.

Her narrative nonfiction book The Dinosaur Artist, based on a story that originated in The New Yorker, will be published by Hachette in Fall 2016. She she also holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Courtesy of The Meek School of Journalism and New Media