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Emerging Artists
Lynda Williams
2024
- Literary
Describing your own writing in a memorable way is a daring thing to do; the description tests the writing it describes. Lynda dares: she says her stories answer the question, “What if Raymond Carver wrote feisty women?” She’s right: These are stories told with the wit and precision of someone with serious work and no words to waste. Stories of women making their own meaning of what they endure, and in that making, they are stories, too, of imperfect and hard-won hope.
– Emerging Artist adjudicators
Lynda Williams is a short fiction writer based in Calgary/Treaty 7 Territory. Her work engages with themes of class, feminism, and mental illness. She describes her flavour as If-Raymond-Carver-Wrote-Feisty-Women. Lynda’s stories have appeared in Grain, the Humber Literary Review, oranges journal, HLR Spotlight, and on Room’s website. She has been a winner of the Edmonton Voices competition, the Reedsy Prompts Challenge, and has received honorable mentions in the Humber Literary Review’s and Room’s fiction contests. Most recently, her story “Berman” placed first runner-up in the Humber Literary Review’s Emerging Writer Contest judged by Zalika Reid-Benta.
She is a graduate of MacEwan and Mount Royal universities, and the Humber School for Writers where she studied under the mentorship of Danila Botha. Her first collection of stories is forthcoming from Guernica in 2025. In the future, she hopes to become a mentor to other emerging writers. In 2024, she will be speaking about the role of mentorship at the Humber Summer Intensive in Toronto and the When Words Collide festival in Calgary.
Lynda Williams is possessed of that rarest and most important of gifts, an original voice. What’s more, she has guts. Throughout her growing body of work, she refuses to shy away from tough topics. That said, the energy and wit of her writing allow her to delve into the dark side of human experience without losing the reader to despair. Her characters are complex human beings driven by compelling needs and desires.
Alissa York, Professor/Program Coordinator Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing Humber School for Writers, Humber College
NEWS AND OTHER WORK
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