Don Williams is a widely published columnist, blogger, short story writer and founding editor of New Millennium Writings, an annual literary anthology published out of Knoxville, TN, and Sevierville, TN, since 1996. For 20 years he wrote for the Knoxville News-Sentinel, including a popular column, which helped turn the tide against the Bush/Cheney catastrophe. He is at work on a novel and several nonfiction books. His columns show up widely at websites such as Opednews.com, ReaderSupportedNews.com, NewMillenniumWritings.com, and occasionally at Truthout, CommonDreams, Buzzflash, Antiwar, and elsewhere. His book of selected journalism, “Heroes, Sheroes and Zeroes, the Best Writings About People,” sold out and is due a second printing. Articles and short stories have been published in Poets & Writers magazine (two cover stories), Writers’ Digest, The Crescent Review 10th Anniversary Issue, The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Chattahoochee Review, Smokies Life magazine, several Knoxville Writers Guild anthologies, and many other papers, periodicals and anthologies. He’s won dozens of awards for features, columns and stories, including a Golden Presscard Award, the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize, Scripps Howard newspaper awards, several Best in State awards from the AP, UPI, etc., and a National Endowment for the Humanities award, which provided for an academic year of study under novelist Nicholas Delbanco and others at the University of Michigan. He attended workshops and classes under the late Alex Haley, and with Lee Smith, Alan Cheuse, journalist Mike Wallace and others. As a freelance writer, he’s interviewed and/or profiled John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, William Kennedy, the late Ken Kesey, Lee Smith, the late Larry Brown, Dolly Parton and many others for magazines and papers. In addition, he’s interviewed presidential candidates, entertainers, street people, adventurers, prisoners, schizophrenics, participated in war games, covered manhunts by police, and interviewed 10 of the 12 astronauts to walk on the moon. He lives with his wife, Jeanne, a special education teacher, in Sevier County. He is frequently asked to give talks about politics, spirituality, history, humor and writing. He likes to run and completed both the 2005 and 2006 Knoxville Marathons… slowly. In 2011, he won the Best Novel Excerpt Award from the Knoxville Writers Guild and was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame.