Patricia J. Williams publishes widely in the areas of race, gender, and law. She began her legal career as a consumer advocate for the Western Center on Law and Poverty and as a deputy city attorney for the City of Los Angeles.

Her writings illuminate some of the United States’ most complex societal problems and challenge ideas about cultural constructs of race and gender. She is the author of the seminal book The Alchemy of Race and Rights, an autobiographical work that integrates humanities, genealogy, memoir, black feminist history, and New England history to illuminate a story of generations of black Boston life from the antebellum period to the present. The book was named one of the twenty-five best books by the Voice Literary Supplement when it was published; Ms. Magazine called it one of the “feminist classics” that “literally changed women’s lives.” A former MacArthur Fellow, Williams is a contributing editor and columnist for The Nation.