Paige Williams is a staff writer at "The New Yorker" and the Laventhol/Newsday Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her acclaimed career includes winning the National Magazine Award for feature writing in 2008 and being named a finalist in another category in 2011. Her work has been anthologized in "The Best American Magazine Writing" and "The Best American Crime Writing." Williams expanded her 2013 "New Yorker" article, "Bones of Contention," into her first book, "The Dinosaur Artist," which explores the illicit fossil trade through the story of a million-dollar Gobi Desert dinosaur skeleton auction.
Williams’s reporting spans diverse subjects, from suburban politics in Detroit and capital punishment in Alabama to paleoanthropology in South Africa and the cultural patrimony disputes of Alaska’s Tlingit peoples. Her writing often delves into the intersections of science, ethics, and geopolitics, marked by meticulous research and narrative depth. A graduate of the University of Mississippi, she holds an MFA from Columbia University and has taught journalism at institutions including New York University, MIT, and Harvard, where she was a Nieman Fellow. Williams has also been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, further cementing her reputation as a distinguished voice in long-form journalism.