From a very young age, Tia Williams knew she wanted to be a magazine editor and author. For over twenty years, she has worked as a journalist in the fashion and beauty industry and authored six bestselling novels.

Williams started her career as beauty editor at magazines like Elle, Lucky, Glamour, Teen People, and Essence. She pioneered the “beauty blog” in the early 2000s with her influential, award-winning website, Shake Your Beauty. In 2004, she published her debut novel, The Accidental Diva, and went on to pen two young adult novels. In 2016, her book The Perfect Find won the African American Literary Award for Best Fiction and was later adapted as a Netflix film starring Gabrielle Union. From the beginning, Williams saw that Black women were not well represented in fashion magazines, and Black stories were not being told in books or on the screen and has worked to change the status quo.

Her 2021 novel, Seven Days in June, was an instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller, as well as Reese’s Book Club pick, and was optioned for a television series. Her newest novel, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde, mixes romance and fantasy against the backdrop of Harlem’s past and present. Her fiction often mirrors some of her own lived experiences featuring a Black female protagonist working in the beauty industry or a single mother living with chronic pain—and are full of romance, comedy, and stories of Black excellence.

In addition to being a wildly popular author, she is also a frequent speaker at libraries, corporations, literary festivals, and women’s groups where she speaks about her experiences as a Black female writer, motherhood, and one of the first editors to cover Black beauty in the mainstream