Don Williams is freelance writer and the founding editor of New Millennium Writings, which he started in 1996. For a number of years he was a feature writer and columnist for the Knoxville News-Sentinel. He profiled moon-walkers, politicos, psychos, soldiers, musicians, writers, artists, dancers, businessmen, street people, mountaineers and an amazing variety of others before leaving the paper to found NMW, write short stories and a novel, The Oracle of the Orchid Lounge, which he just finished and hopes to get happily published soon. Like you and your students, he's a working writer. He still pens influential opinion pieces which can be found at OpEdNews.com, MWCnews.net, NewMillenniumWritings.com and many other websites. His articles and stories have been published in Poets & Writers (two cover stories), Writers' Digest, The Crescent Review 10th Anniversary Issue, Los Angeles Times, Chattahoochee Review, Smokies Life, several anthologies, including A Tennessee Homecoming, Low Explosions, Breathing the Same Air, Christmas Blues, and many other venues. His honors include a Golden Presscard Award, the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize, Scripps Howard newspaper awards and a National Endowment for the Humanities award, which provided for an academic year of study under novelist Nicholas Delbanco and others at the University of Michigan. He's attended workshops and classes with novelists Lee Smith, Alan Cheuse, journalist Mike Wallace, the late Alex Haley, and he's profiled the late John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, William Kennedy, the late Ken Kesey, Lee Smith, Larry Brown, Al Gore, Dolly Parton and many others. He is frequently asked to give talks about writing, politics, spirituality, history, humor and more. He likes to run, and he completed both the 2005 and 2006 Knoxville Marathons. He just might try to make it a triple in 2010.