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CHRISTMAS PARTY
Thursday, December 1st Park Vista in Gatlinburg
Meet at 5:30 in the Lounge Dinner at 7 P.M.
Cost for dinner is $25 including tax and tip payable at the November meeting.
Or contact Joyce McCarter (436-6228) Joann Felsing (428-4811), or Catherine Anderson (430-9003) EVERYONE is welcome.
As our guest speaker, we're honored to have DON WILLIAMS,
the great columnist for the Knoxville News Sentinel. As a
speaker, Don is always entertaining, informative, and high-value.
And if you've read the angry letters about his column in the newspaper,
you know he really drives the right-wingers in Tennessee crazy.
Our kind of guy!
DON'S BIO:
Many
of you know Don. He attends St. Joseph Episcopal Church. In the
early 1980s, he was a prize-winning reporter for The Mountain Press in Sevierville. Now he is best known as the outspoken columnist for the Knoxville News-Sentinel. Others know him as founding editor of New Millennium Writings,
an annual literary anthology published out of Knoxville and Sevierville
since 1996. He is finishing a novel, ORACLE OF THE ORCHID LOUNGE.
His selected journalism is now available in a book, under the title, “Heroes, Sheroes and Zeroes, the Best Writings About People, by Don Williams." His short stories and journalism have been published in The
Crescent Review 10th Anniversary Issue, The Chicago Tribune, Los
Angeles Times, Chattahoochee Review, Poets & Writers magazine (two cover stories), Writers’ Digest
and many other papers, periodicals and anthologies. He’s won two dozen
awards for his features and columns, including a Golden Presscard
Award, the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize and a National Endowment for
the Humanities award, which provided for a paid year academic year of
study at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied
under the likes of journalist Mike Wallace, novelist
Nicholas Delbanco, DNA scientist and pioneer James Watson and many
others. As a freelance writer, he’s interviewed or profiled novelists
such as John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, William Kennedy, the late Ken
Kesey, Lee Smith, Larry Brown and many others. In addition, he’s
covered desperate manhunts for murderers and rapists, interviewed
presidential candidates, schizophrenics, entertainers, street people,
adventurers, participated in war games, and interviewed 10 of the 12
astronauts to walk on the moon. Although he gave up fulltime journalism
in order to finish his novel and publish a literary journal, he still
manages to write a popular weekly column for The News-Sentinel. Some of
his commentary is available at www.mach2.com.
He lives with his wife, Jeanne, a special education teacher, their
three children, two dogs, three cats and a ferret, in a secluded valley
in Sevier County. He is frequently asked to give talks about politics,
spirituality, history and humor. He enjoys running, and last
year completed the inaugural Knoxville Marathon with his wife
Jeanne, who’s a better runner than he is.
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