At 95, Donald Mace Williams still begins his days surrounded by books, handwritten drafts, and lines of poetry. The longtime journalist, professor, and poet remains intellectually active from his Bouldin Creek home, where he is currently translating a 19th-century German poem by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.
Williams’ enduring love of language began in high school when he first encountered Beowulf. The Old English epic captivated him so deeply that it later became the subject of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin, where he focused on the poem’s prosody.
Born on October 29, 1929—the day of the stock market crash—Williams spent his early years moving across the country due to his father’s work and the impact of the Great Depression. His family’s travels took him from Lubbock to Miami Beach to Washington, D.C., and briefly to Austin, where he lived during his junior year of high school.
“When I was 16 or 17, I told my dad I wanted to be a writer,” Williams recalled. “He said, ‘If you want to be a writer, go to work for a newspaper, where they’ll blue-pencil your copy and teach you not to waste words.’ So I did.”
After high school, he worked as a copy boy at The Denver Post, where his father was a reporter. He went on to study at Texas Tech, initially majoring in German before switching to English. His career in journalism included roles at Newsday, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the Amarillo Globe-News. Despite his success in newspapers, Williams returned to graduate school, driven by a desire to teach and carve out time for poetry during summer breaks.
He earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees while teaching journalism, eventually moving back into the newsroom before retiring in 1999 from his role as a writing coach at The Wichita Eagle. Retirement marked a turning point—Williams embraced fiction and poetry more fully.
His first novel, Black Tuesday’s Child, follows a small-town Texan caught between local life and a dream of becoming an opera singer—reflecting Williams’ own decades-long hobby of classical vocal training, which he began at age 16.
While his fiction often draws on lived experience, one of his later works, Wolfe, takes creative liberty by reimagining Beowulf in the Old West. His 2023 collection Being Ninety features autobiographical prose meditations on aging and the prairie landscapes of his past.
That same year, Williams released Beowulf: For Fireside and Schoolroom, and he is set to publish Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke: A 150th Anniversary Reader this September.
Williams relocated to Austin once more in 2023, this time to be closer to a woman he met on Match.com after the passing of his wife. The couple now lives just six blocks apart, enjoying daily walks, crossword puzzles, and dinner together.
Although he remains active, Williams admits he often wrestles with time management.
“I waste a lot of time reading The Wall Street Journal and the headlines online,” he said. “But sometimes ideas still come to me—a line or an image—and that’s enough to start writing.”
He continues to translate poetry and hopes to return to writing original verse soon. Even as inspiration strikes less frequently, Williams’ dedication to language, literature, and expression remains unwavering.
“I thought, heck, I’ll just move to Austin,” he said with a smile. “It feels like home.”
