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Writer
Guerilla memoirist, essay writer and travel journalist, Allison K Williams has written about race, culture and comedy for National Public Radio, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and Travelers' Tales.
Her fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres, Smokelong Quarterly and Deep South; essays in Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, The Drum and Brevity. Her humor writing was a Mark Twain Award winner; she has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. As a storyteller, Allison has appeared onstage at London's Theatre Royal and Rich Mix, India's Filocafe, and is a two-time winner of The Moth StorySLAM.
She has been a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Writers Workshop with Dinty W. Moore; a three-time Associate Artist at Atlantic Center for the Arts with Rick Moody, David Shields, and Dani Shapiro; and has received grants from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo.
Allison is the Social Media Editor at Brevity, and the host of the Brevity Podcast.
Home base is currently Dubai, where "The Pork Shop" is a separate, dimly-lit room at the back of the supermarket. It's like buying meat porn.
Editor
As The Unkind Editor, I can help you get to one of two destinations:
A tight, well-written and compelling manuscript, an excellent query letter, and a better-than-average shot at agent representation and traditional publication;
Or
An impeccably proofread, beautiful-to-look-at, well-written book you will be proud to self-publish and share with friends and strangers alike.
I provide developmental editing, line editing, manuscript evaluations and writer coaching. After a sample edit of your writing and a preliminary consultation to determine your goals, we'll choose which type(s) of editing will best help your work. If you're finalizing a manuscript, I can coordinate beta readers and help you determine what feedback is most useful and how to implement it, as well as helping fine-tune your query and begin the query process.
For essayists and humor writers, we'll work together to identify where your work fits and craft pieces with specific publications in mind.
Please note: I am not accepting new clients at this time. Thank you for your visit; my Seven Drafts webinar is available if you resonate with my style and want to apply my editing principles to your work.
After six previous rejections, McSweeneys is taking the Haggadah!!!!! I’m beyond thrilled! It sounds cliche but I couldn’t have done this without your help over these last few months. Truly. Your impact on my writing has been “YUUUGE!”
~Terry Heyman, essayist and comedy writer
~E.G., memoirist
OMG I LOVE BEING EDITED!!!! ...once I understood the overall trajectory it was like, oh! I have a puzzle now! Without an editor I'm putting it together knowing it's a picture of a cat but I don't have a visual on the end product. WITH AN EDITOR I HAVE THE BOX COVER!!!!
~Erin Clark, essayist
To my editor, thank you, thank you, thank you. There are editors and then there is The Unkind Editor. Your insight and expertise not only made my book stronger, but also made me a better writer.
~A. K. Mills, novelist
More information
Rates and applying to work with The Unkind Editor
Work
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Anthologized in Selected Memories: Five Years of Hippocampus Magazine
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Speaker
Allison K Williams is a lively, informative speaker with great stage presence, fantastic delivery, and solid, well-researched talks packed full of information your audience can use right now. She's presented at conferences, workshops and institutions including Hippocamp Creative Nonfiction Conference, Writers Wing, Aquinas College and the University of South Florida.
Topics include:
Self-Edit Like a Pro (includes live editing of participant pages)
Write Better With Social Media
Get Published in Literary Magazines
Building Genuine, Useful Author Platform
Compelling Storytelling
Seven Drafts to a Novel That Works
How to Write a Memoir
and a variety of writing craft talks and intensive workshops.
Allison is also available to moderate panels and lead workshops and retreats.
Download a PDF with session descriptions and presentation history (Full Size 9MB) (Compressed 787KB).
Audience feedback:
...I loved your presentation. It was jam packed with useful information — more so than most workshops I’ve attended at other conferences.
~Laura Laing
Your energy and expertise are inspiring. Thanks for ripping apart my paragraph. Ha! Seriously, I learned a lot. That's the point of a conference. You rock.
~Terri Kiral
I have received the best take-home tools from your two workshops. Tonight, while waiting in line for Mary Karr to sign my book, I pulled out an essay I thought I had taken as far as I could revision-wise, and it was like I was looking at it with new eyes, and I marked it all up, and it is a better read for it.
~Jess Chuckalovcak
...Appreciate many things about your presence and energy. Important to hear the valuable information you have to share. You believe in what you have to teach and give it your all. FABULOUS!
~Elizabeth L. Hainstock
Find out about booking Allison for your event.