A Meaningful Kind of Symbiosis

She is the 10th SPS alum to receive the St. Paul’s School Alumni Association Award within 25 years of graduation. For that reason, there are many in the School community who will be watching, with great interest, the career of Caroline Randall Williams ’06. Currently serving as the Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University in her native Nashville, Tenn., the award-winning author, teacher, and activist has established herself as a cultural influencer on a national scale.

 

“It’s obviously a tremendous honor,” says Williams of the SPS honor. “Attending St. Paul’s was deeply formative for me, and to be celebrated by the School that helped shape me is a meaningful kind of symbiosis.”

 

Williams attended Harvard, earning her undergraduate degree in English and American language and literature. After college, she ventured south to Sunflower County, Miss., on a Teach for America assignment. Williams taught high school English for two years in one of the poorest counties in the U.S., and helped many students pass their English exit exams. She went on to receive a master’s in creative writing (poetry) from the University of Mississippi.

 

While working in the Mississippi delta, Williams, along with her mother, bestselling author Alice Randall, started penning her first book; the young-adult novel The Diary of B.B. Bright, Possible Princess. The book won the Harlem Book Fair’s Phillis Wheatley Prize, given to literary works that transcend culture, boundary, and perception. A year after the book’s release, Williams was honored as a Cave Canem Fellow, joining an elite group of influential African American poets and authors.

 

Her second co-authored book, Soul Food Love, received the prestigious NAACP Image Award and Williams was named one of “50 People Changing the South” by Southern Living magazine. Williams also released a book of poems – Lucy Negro Redux – in 2015 that earned wide praise, and was republished by Jack White’s Third Man Books in 2019 to coincide with the opening of the book-inspired ballet.

 

In June of 2020, as the nation grappled with the realities of race and racism in modern-day America, Williams penned the essay “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body is a Confederate Monument,” for the New York Times. Not only did the piece make a tremendous national impact, it represented a personal highlight for Williams in an already accomplished young career.

 

“In more than one way, that piece wouldn’t have happened without St. Paul’s,” notes Williams. “I wouldn’t have had the confidence to send it in if my dear friend, Jen Parker ’07, hadn’t been fighting for voices like mine at the New York Times opinion desk.”

 

As she continues to create and inspire, Williams will hold true to the traits she learned at St. Paul’s, from making her bed every morning to “always trying to speak the truth in love.”