"Pura Vida" by Katherine Williams

Katherine Williams is a White Southerner who grew up in the Navy and lived in Charleston SC as a young adult, then spent twenty years in Los Angeles, and returned to SC twenty years ago. She’s a Pushcart and Best of the Web nominee with poems in Spillway, South Carolina Review, Projector, Measure, Diagram, and elsewhere. She began writing in 1991, published three chapbooks, and studied poetry with Richard Garcia’s Long Table Poets for twenty years. Her first poetry collection, ‘The Devil Cruises Pacific Coast Highway,’ has just been published by Kelsay Books. Williams has been a research technician at UCLA Medical Center, Hollings Marine Laboratories, and the Medical Univ. of SC; an Apple-certified technician; a college chemistry tutor; and a graphic artist and web developer. As a board member of The Poetry Society of SC, she created the Warrior Poets Series, presenting veteran-poets at the Charleston VA Medical Center, and as founding chair of James Island Arts Council, she created Poetry at McLeod, in which illustrious Black poets interpret the plantation experience-from enslavement, to ascendancy in all walks of American life.