Rynn Williams

WILLIAMS-- Rynn Booher, age 47. Poet and beloved mother, died of accidental causes on July 15, 2009 at her home in Brooklyn, NY. She is survived by her children Bolivia, Violet and Beckett Williams, who will now reside with their father, Stephen P. Williams, and his wife and daughter in Brooklyn; her mother Jeannene Booher of Otis, MA; and her father Dale Booher, stepmother Lisa Stamm Booher, and sister Vanessa Booher of Shelter Island and Manhattan. Ms. Booher Williams received a B.A. in Journalism and M.A. in English Literature from New York University in Manhattan, and an MFA in Writing from Warren Wilson in Asheville, NC. In 2001 she received a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She has published poems in The Nation, Massachusetts Review, Field, Agni Online, New York Quarterly, North American Review and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. Her book Adonis Garage, winner of the 2004 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, was published by The University of Nebraska Press. "If Walt Whitman had been born a woman, and had been around the block, and noticed things, and wrote with all her courage, skill, and love, what we'd get, if we were lucky, is this book." --Brooks Haxton, author of Uproar: Antiphonies to Psalms. Donations in Rynn's memory may go to the Lisel Mueller Scholarship Fund supporting Warren Wilson MFA students with small children: Friends of Writers, Inc., PO Box 128, Marshfield, VT 05658.