LIFE

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Gary Williams grew up in Billings, Montana, in a working-class family.  He had one sibling, a younger brother, who died of lung cancer in 1999.  His degrees are from Washington University in St. Louis (A.B. 1969) and Cornell University (M.A. 1972, Ph.D. 1973).  In graduate school his areas of emphasis were colonial/19th-century American literature/intellectual history and 20th-century British and American fiction.

He has been a member of the English department at the University of Idaho since 1973. He was chair of the department from 1986 to 1996 and an inaugural College of Letters and Science Humanities Fellow in 1998-99.  He is currently director of the M.A.-literature program for the English department, and in 2007-08 he is serving as the university's first Distinguished Humanities Professor.

He married Joy Passanante in 1970.  Joy also teaches at UI, and you can read all about her at her web site.  They have two daughters: Liza, who lives in Brooklyn and uses her theater training running an after-school drama program for PS 32 in Carroll Gardens; and Emily, who works as a project director for a faculty member at the University of Washington's medical school and is working on a Ph.D. in Health Services.  Liza's husband Brad Strickler is a marketing manager for Scholastic Publishers.