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 Dr. Elizabeth Yahn Williams is an award-winning poet-playwright who prefers performing in poetic dramas to practicing in the legal profession that was her career from the late 60s to 80s.

Still, she thanks LMU and Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, for enriching her treasury from which to print stories. While always a writer, Elizabeth has been a teacher since second grade at St. Catherine's School in Columbus, Ohio, where she covered first grade when the nun-in-charge was called away. Later, at Marymount High School and St. Mary of the Springs Academy, her work in creative communications led her to obtain a scholarship at Marymount College, PVE, CA, where she graduated cum laude, and subsequently received a Ford Foundation grant to join a pilot program at UCLA, culminating in a lifetime California Secondary Teaching credential in English.

Earning a Juris Doctor at Loyola University, she embarked on a career as an attorney and law professor. Attempting to avoid bankruptcy, she learned enough about it that the subject became her specialty, which she taught to other lawyers for several years, along with arbitration law. She also became a leader in the struggle against gender discrimination in the legal profession: picture a Sisyphean salmon swimming up Niagara Falls.
Noticing that the law provided far too much work for far too little joy in life, she shifted careers and became a poet, playwright, and educator. For her mentoring honor students at Mira Costa College, she was made a "Most Distinguished Honorary" life member of their Phi Theta Kappa chapter. With a grant from KOCT, Dr. Williams wrote, directed and hosted a TV mini-series about that group and other cultural opportunities in North San Diego County that won an award as a Telly Finalist.

She is a member of NCAP, the Publishers and Writers of San Diego and its Read Local initiative, as well as the National League of American Pen Women, whose branches have honored her with several awards. Her grants include those from SDPA-PMA/BookExpo 2000, Vermont Studio Center, National Audio Theatre Foundation, SLS, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts: Auvillar, France. Other foreign studies include a year at the University of London, England, and a term at the University of Quebec at Trois Rivieres, Canada. Most recently, her about-to-be released chapbook, SEASONAL REFLECTIONS, became a 2008 Unpublished Poetry Chapbook Finalist in the San Diego Book and Writing Awards competition.

As former Director of poetry program at the Solana Beach Library in 2005-'06, Dr. Williams met its co-founder, Dr. Robert Thomas Lundy, her "Partner-in-Rhyme" with whom she has authored eight chapbooks from which they perform as the team of Hither & Yahn.

She is currently the Emcee for Oceanside Library's National Authors' Day and Co-Editor of SUMMATION 2008: THE MERGING OF ART AND POETRY, a project of the Escondido Municipal Gallery and Poets INC.

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