Wyatt Williams, a graduate student and Iowa Arts Fellow entering his second year in the Nonfiction Writing Program, will release his debut collection of essays, Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating, from UNC Press this fall. 

Of the achievement, Williams said, “Springer Mountain is the culmination of several years of investigative journalism and archival research. For most of the past decade, I’ve been taking notes and hanging around farms and slaughterhouses and hunting camps and restaurants while trying to reconcile and better understand my relationship to the animals I eat. Without the Iowa Arts Fellowship, I’m not sure if I would have ever been able to see this book through to the finish. The support of the Nonfiction Writing Program has meant the world to me.” 

Williams is a former restaurant critic. His essays have been published by The New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, The Believer, and The Paris Review. In 2018, his essay “After Oranges” was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award and anthologized in The Best American Food Writing series.