Interview with Writer Phillip B. Williams

Poet who recently released the surrealist historical novel ‘Ours’

Photo taken by author.

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I had the pleasure of interviewing Phillip B. Williams back in 2018, when he was featured at University of San Francisco’s Emerging Writer’s Festival. Originally intended for my undergraduate literary magazine, this interview had long been digitally erased on their website, and I thought little of my interaction with Williams until seeing his new novel Ours prominently displayed at Powell’s Books.

I find it hugely impressive that a poet’s debut novel is nearly 600 pages. Classified as “a truly magnetic work of magical realism” (Elle), Ours centers a haven for previously enslaved people in Missouri. The community, named Ours, is magically protected from outsiders by the sorceress Saint, but threats arise over a period of four decades.

Then again, I shouldn’t have been surprised by Williams’ versatility. Phillip B. Williams is a celebrated and experienced writer whose work can be found in his poetry collections The Thief in the Interior and Mutiny; the poetry anthology, Prime; literary magazines; chapbooks; and more. Williams has received a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and in…