Poet Phyllis Williams, Impresario of the Covington Writers, a Plateau Area Writers Association critique group, will be the featured speaker at PAWA’s quarterly meeting March 10 in the Enumclaw Public Library.

Williams’ topic for the two-hour meeting which begins at 10 a.m. will be poetry and memoir writing.

“When I’m not lost in the serious business of writing  poetry and memoir, I continue the private practice I began as a marriage and family therapist nearly 30 years ago,” Williams wrote in PAWA’s release.

Before that Williams taught high school and community college writing and literature. She has masters degrees from Santa Clara University and San Jose State. Her work has appeared in Peerless Poets’ anthology Cotton and Spirit, Montserrat Review, caesura, Finding What You Didn’t Lose, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, PAWA’s anthologies Defining Moments & Potpourri, PAWA’s Spring and Fall Quarterly, 2008, The Journal of Poetry Therapy and other publications.

More than three dozen of her poems have won contest prizes. In 2004, she completed two books: “Salt Years,” a poem-memoir about growing up in a family torn apart by the Great Depression, and “Sand Trails,” a collection.

Since then all her energies have been devoted to moving and getting settled, after nearly 50 years, from California’s Santa Clara Valley back to my birthplace in the Pacific Northwest.