A Fairytale Family

Within the first weeks of her arrival at Washington College in the fall of 2018, English and Communication & Media Studies double-major Tamia Williams ’21 already felt like she had found another family.

 

An avid reader and writer, she quickly found her home in the English department and jumped into life as an English student, attending writing workshops and joining the Writers’ Union. Since then, she has added Cleopatra’s Sisters and the position of Treasurer for the English Honor Society Sigma Tau Delta to her extracurriculars, alongside an impressive roster of campus employment and internships.

As a summer intern at the Rose O’Neill Literary House, Williams had the opportunity to expand her own writing repertoire even as she shepherded the high school students who were attending the Cherry Tree Young Writers’ Conference. Preferentially a fiction writer whose work has won the annual Literary House Genre Fiction Prize, a nonfiction workshop with Dr. Julie Marie Wade changed Williams’ attitude toward the creative nonfiction genre. “Cherry Tree allowed me to realize that nonfiction can involve any event you desire to put into words, even if only for yourself,” she said of the conference.

Since that first summer, Williams has also served as a Copyediting Fellow and screener at the Cherry Tree Literary Journal and a student blogger for the Department of Admissions. Most recently, she interned for the Library of Congress Publishing Office as part of the Explore America Summer Internship Program, where her work included proofreading manuscripts, creating and organizing art logs, checking source citations, and researching using the Library catalog.

While there is still time before graduation, Williams is already looking to the future. Her Senior Capstone project will consider the influence that fairy tales have on identity norms in literary texts and modern media, and after graduation, she plans to pursue editing and publishing as a career, with focuses in both fiction and nonfiction.