Caroline Randall Williams is a catalyst. She makes change possible by bringing art and joy into the room in such a way that the grit of real challenge and limits may become eclipsed by analysis, innovation, and skill. As the host of her new television series Hungry for Answers (Executive Produced by Viola Davis for Discovery Plus), she is a multi-threat creative who proves that the best conversations really do happen at intersections of many kinds of art.
She is an award-winning poet, young adult novelist, and cookbook author as well as an activist, public intellectual, performance artist, and scholar. She is the author of the powerful New York Times Opinion piece “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body is a Confederate Monument,” which grabbed international attention as a reckoning in the movement to dismantle systemic racism.
Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Williams is a Harvard graduate and a Writer-in-Residence in Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. She focuses her work and speaks to the places where art, business, and scholarship intersect, moving people closer to their best lives and corporations closer to their ideal identities.
You may have seen her on Morning Joe, or Dr. Oz, or The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell. More likely you’ve read her. Caroline’s first book, The Diary of B.B. Bright, Possible Princess (co-authored with Alice Randall) won the Harlem Book Fair’s Phillis Wheatley Award and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award.
Her second co-authored volume, Soul Food Love won the NAACP Image Award and got her invited to speak at The Smithsonian. Her book of poetry, Lucy Negro, Redux, earned rave reviews and got optioned to become a ballet that the New York Times called “something wildly original, something so unlike anything else that all description falls short of its otherworldly reality. No wonder she was chosen in 2015 by Southern Living as one of “50 People Changing the South” for her work around food justice and was named by The Root as one of the “100 most influential African Americans of 2020.”
She has taught in two of the poorest states in the union -- Mississippi and West Virginia -- and she has been educated at two of the richest universities on the globe -- Harvard and Oxford. She knows how to navigate intersections. To all the work she does, Caroline brings a fierce intelligence, disarming charm, and a depth of lived experience
