Elliott Oliver
Williams

The Story

Elliott Oliver Williams — yes, you have to say the whole thing, like A Tribe Called Quest — is a first-generation storyteller born and raised in New York City, now based in Scottsdale, Arizona. His debut novel, Loose Here, draws from a family secret kept for sixty years across two generations, two coasts, and eleven people who grew up as cousins without knowing exactly what that meant.

The story began — as the best ones do — with a phone call. September 4, 2015. Williams was forty-one years old. What he learned that morning would reframe not just his family history but his own childhood, the rumor that followed him from a Harlem stoop at age eleven, and the man he had called Pastor his entire life.

"I didn't choose this story. It chose me, the way the truth always eventually chooses the generation that can finally hold it."

Williams spent nearly a decade piecing together the full picture — interviewing surviving family members in their eighties, tracing DNA results through the 2000s and into 2015, and sitting with the specific grief of discovering that the preacher he respected and the grandfather he never knew were the same man.

Loose Here is his first novel. It is a work of fiction inspired by true events. The names have been changed. The emotional truth has not.

Book Two: Pastor

Williams is currently at work on the second book in the series, which follows the narrator's personal reckoning with having known Elias Cole as his pastor — not as his grandfather — and the ongoing search for the alleged additional children Elias left scattered across the northeastern United States.

For speaking engagements, book club visits, or media inquiries:
contact@elliottowilliams.com