Eric Williams is a first-year candidate for fiction in Iowa State’s MFA in Creative Writing and
Environment. He also holds a BA in Modern Literature from UC Santa Cruz. He writes
speculative fiction and essays about a future in which traditional agriculture is being replaced by
synthetic alternatives, man-made food-like products. He wants to know what happens to food
when you manufacture it instead of grow it, and to explore the ways these new methods of food
production clash with long-established ones.
Before relocating to Ames, he spent five years and a lot of late nights working in the restaurant
industry in New York City. His favorite pastimes there were riding his bike through the city like
a game of Frogger and spending too much money on wine. Before New York, he spent two years
in Latin America working on farms and teaching English. Outside of the MFA, Eric’s interests
include gardening, running, cooking and fantasizing about the bygone era in which cell phones
did not exist.