Liberating Dixie, a collection from Williams’ half-century of journalism, is an exhilarating tour through life as seen by a provocative and insightful Southern writer. The characters range from Jesse Helms to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, with Bill Clinton, Ross Barnett, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner’s cow also making appearances.  The topics provide a panorama of Southern life – politics, religion, race, gay rights, artistic freedom, school  reform, college sports, the joys and challenges of family life, as well as Ed Williams’ rules for living.

For 25 years Ed Williams was editor of the editorial pages at The Charlotte Observer, where his columns and editorials were part of projects that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1981 and 1988. He earned a B.A. in history from the University of Mississippi, where he edited the Daily Mississippian. He served two years in the U.S. Army and in 1967 joined Hodding Carter’s Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, as a reporter. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a writer for the  Ford Foundation before coming to the Observer as an editorial writer in 1973. He retired in 2008 and was inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife, Marylyn.