Rita Williams came of age in the cold and rugged mountain terrain of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. When Rita Williams was four, her mother died in a Denver boarding house. She was left her in the care of her aunt Daisy, the last surviving African American widow of a Union soldier. A maverick in her own right, Daisy spirited her sharecropping family out of the lynching South and reinvented them as ranch hands and hunting guides out West. One by one, family members slipped away, either by death or to an easier existence elsewhere, leaving Rita as Daisy’s own personal project to right the racial wrongs of the past and to make good on a lifetime of hardships and thwarted ambitions. If the Creek Don’t Rise tells the story of how Rita found her way out from under the crippling legacy of her family, and, instead of becoming “a perfect credit to her race,” discovered a way to be herself.

Rita’s previous work has appeared in LA Weekly and O, The Oprah Magazine. A former actress, musician, and college professor, she is a thesis advisor for the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. She received her MFA in theater from the California Institute of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles. If the Creek Don’t Rise: My Life Out West with the Last Black Widow of the Civil War is her first book, published by Harcourt in May 2006. For further information, please visit www.ritawilliams.com.

Rita Williams will appear on Thursday, Oct. 26, 7 pm, in the Price City Library and Friday, Oct. 27, 7 pm, in the Heritage Museum of Layton. Rita will also participate in “The Fertile Field of Memories: A Panel on Writing the Memoir” on Saturday, Oct. 28, 12:30 pm, in the Salt Lake City Main Library, 4th Floor Conference Room.