Dr. Susan Millar Williams to Appear in Documentary about South Carolina Pulitzer Prize Winners

Dr. Susan Millar Williams, a Palmer faculty member, is heading to Columbia this week to film an episode in the forthcoming documentary, “From the Jazz Age to the Digital Age: Pulitzer Prize Winners in South Carolina.” There will be three, 30-minute programs. The first will feature South Carolina’s living Pulitzer Prize commenters and columnists. The second 30-minute program will feature four of South Carolina’s living Pulitzer Prize winning reporters. The third program will examine the significance and lasting impact of the late Julia Peterkin, South Carolina’s only recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in literature. Williams is the author of the biography A Devil and a Good Woman, Too: The Lives of Julia Peterkin.

The third, literature-focused program featuring Julia Peterkin will feature, in addition to Williams, Gayla Jamison, producer/director of the film “Cheating the Stillness: The World of Julia Peterkin,”  and Peterkin scholar Margaret Washington of Cornell University.  The program is expected to broaden audiences for the high-quality writing exemplified by Peterkin, who won the Pulitzer in 1929, and bring her story to a new generation of writers and readers.  They will talk about her gifts as a storyteller—she was a well-to-do white woman writing about African Americans in a way that made most readers assume she was also African American—and they will address her remarkable achievements in the context of the culture, the times and the expected roles of women in society during the Jazz Age.

Williams teaches online Creative Writing classes at Trident Technical College, which allow students to train with a professional writer.