![]() ![]() ![]() During her time at Hofstra University she said “real life” got into the way of her writing. Williams-Garcia graduated from Hofstra University in 1980, where she studied with authors Richard Price and Sonia Pilcer. Her teachers encouraged her to write for herself, and at the age of fourteen she published her first story in Highlights magazine. She discovered biographies of historical figures, such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and a single novel, Mary Ellen, Student Nurse. In the sixth grade, she went looking for literature for young adults that featured black protagonists. She remembers discussing race relations and racism in the classroom in the aftermath of the 1968 riots and the assassination of Dr. Williams-Garcia was exposed to racial issues while growing up during the 1960s. By the time she entered school, Williams-Garcia was already an accomplished reader and writer of poetry and stories, most of them involving her siblings, a brother and a sister. Rita Williams-Garcia developed her reading skills early in life, teaching herself to read at age two by learning to associate letters with their sounds, partly through looking at billboards and partly through the efforts of her older sister, who would often share her books with her. ![]() Her father was in the military, so they moved around, from Queens, to New York to Arizona, California, Georgia, and then back to Queens. Rita Williams-Garcia was born in Queens, New York. ![]()
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