Adele Elise Williams is the author of WAGER, published in the Miller Williams Poetry Series, and Sacrosanct, forthcoming from the Wisconsin Poetry Series. With Dana Levin, she co-edited Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master. Adele’s critical and creative work examines how gender performance and working-class ecologies shape and unsettle distinctions between high and low aesthetics.

A Southern writer and baaaaad woman, Adele understands home as plural and intentional. Her homes include Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Appalachian State University, an MFA in poetry from Virginia Tech, and a PhD in Literature and Poetics from the University of Houston. Her work has been supported by Inprint, Ucross, VCCA, Hindman Settlement School, and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing, and the Emily Morrison Poetry Prize.

Adele currently serves as an Assistant Editor at Texas Review Press and Conjunctions, and previously spent four years as Nonfiction Editor at Gulf Coast. She has also worked as an Assistant Editor for Noemi Press and the minnesota review. As an Editor, Adele is committed to cultivating work that resists easy categorization and attends to textures of voice, form, and innovation.

At UNC–Chapel Hill, Adele teaches courses in poetry, literature, creative nonfiction, and composition, inviting students to think across genres and locate their own urgencies within the faux-boundaries of language.

Tldr: Adele is Southern and scholarly and obsessed with all things naughty and numinous.

Adele’s CV