Author

Paige Williams

@williams_paige

Paige Williams writes for The New Yorker and is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. Winner of the National Magazine Award for feature writing in 2008, and a finalist in 2011 and 2009 (shared) , she has been anthologized in five volumes of the Best American series, including twice in The Best American Magazine Writing. She is the former editor of Nieman Storyboard and has taught narrative nonfiction at Harvard, M.I.T., NYU, Emory, the University of Pittsburgh, and at her alma mater, the University of Mississippi. She was a '97 Nieman Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her narrative nonfiction book "The Dinosaur Artist" is forthcoming, from Hachette, in Fall 2016.

How to interview, structure, choose your medium, edit for sound, identify the story arc and more

How to interview, structure, choose your medium, edit for sound, identify the story arc and more

The new student of multimedia narrative may want to bookmark an archive on digital storytelling by Mark Berkey-Gerard, who teaches online journalism at Rowan University, in New Jersey. A Columbia…
20 writing and editing tips from Tracy Kidder + Richard Todd

20 writing and editing tips from Tracy Kidder + Richard Todd

In the book Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, memorably instructive lines for writers and editors appear on almost every page. The authors, the Pulitzer-winning nonfiction writer Tracy Kidder and his…

10 things you can learn from Roger Angell’s “This Old Man”

The story of the week has been Roger Angell’s “This Old Man” (The New Yorker). Angell is widely revered for his body of work on baseball, but in this piece he…

“Why’s this so good?” – The badass women edition

From the “Why’s this so good?” archives, a handful of great reads about, or by, brilliant, brave, inspiring women, featuring Joan Didion, Rita Dove, Calvin Trillin, Julia Barton, Edna Buchanan,…
Robert Caro, Part 2: On work habits, enthusiasm and minimizing distraction

Robert Caro, Part 2: On work habits, enthusiasm and minimizing distraction

On Thursday, we ran Part 1 of Robert Caro’s conversation with the Washington Post’s Anne Hull, on reporting, sacrifice, sources and finding book projects. Today, in the second and final part,…
Robert Caro, Part 1: On finding book projects, reporting, sacrifice and sources

Robert Caro, Part 1: On finding book projects, reporting, sacrifice and sources

Hearing Robert Caro talk about his work is like getting a master class in longform journalism. A Nieman Fellow, Class of 1966, Caro is the bestselling biographer of Robert Moses…
Storytelling and policy: The Washington Post's new narrative project

Storytelling and policy: The Washington Post’s new narrative project

The expansive projects that Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron announced today is good news for narrative journalists in two ways: The paper plans to expand the Sunday magazine (we…

“Online, each story is at best its own magazine”

On New Year’s Eve, The Big Roundtable published a piece that you might have missed. Steve Kandell, the features director at BuzzFeed, wrote about the freedoms and challenges of working…

So here’s where we are with the longform “fetish” question

The Grantland/”Dr. V’s Magical Putter” controversy morphed into a debate today over the nature and value of longform after the New York Times‘ Jonathan Mahler argued, in an op-ed, that…
3 countries, 4 conferences

3 countries, 4 conferences

If only we could start an international narrative-journalism conference crawl — sort of like a pub crawl, but with pencils and notebooks — here’s how we’d map out the year:“Power of Narrative:…