Paige Williams

Tracey Goggans

Paige Williams is a staff writer at The New Yorker. A National Magazine Award winner for feature writing, she has had her journalism anthologized in various volumes of the Best American series, including The Best American Magazine Writing and The Best American Crime Writing. The New York Times named her book "The Dinosaur Artist" one of the hundred Notable Books of 2018. She is the Laventhol/Newsday Visiting Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, and has taught at universities including the University of Mississippi, NYU, the University of Missouri, and, at M.I.T., in the Knight Science Journalism program. A Mississippi native, Williams has been a fellow of The MacDowell Colony and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. At The New Yorker, she has written about suburban politics in Detroit, the death penalty in Alabama, paleoanthropology in South Africa, the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and the theft of cultural palimony from the Tlingit peoples of Alaska.

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Adventures, Quests, and Crazy Obsessions

What does it take to get to the bottom a of crime against nature? Three best-selling authors talk about the crimes and crazy obsessions that lead them to write their fascinating books. From the search for dinosaur bone thieves, to a modern-day quest for a famous 17th-century sunken pirate ship, to the rescue of an endangered species on the brink in the Gulf of California, these authors take us behind-the-scenes to talk about how these compelling books came to be and what they learned from them.

National Parks Experience (Seats 146)  
Sat, Mar 2, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Multigenre
Signing area: Sales & Signing Area - National Parks (following presentation)  

Panelists: Brooke Bessesen, Robert Kurson, Paige Williams
Moderator: Carol Schwalbe

Obsessions and Consequences

Three non-fiction authors address how obsessions affect the lives of those obsessed and the consequences that unravel. One book is about Israeli spies posing as Arabs and their successful and tragic results, another is about a physician obsessed by anger toward a colleague and the third is about a fossil collector obsessed with gaining fame and wealth.

Integrated Learning Center Room 130 (Seats 143, Wheelchair accessible)  
Sun, Mar 3, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
True Crime
Signing area: Sales & Signing Area - Integrated Learning Center (following presentation)  

Panelists: A.J. Flick, Matti Friedman, Paige Williams
Moderator: Beverly Tobiason

Book:

The Dinosaur Artist

Nature / Environment / Outdoor Adventure
Hachette
September 2018
ISBN 9780316382533
320 pages
$28.00, INSTORE

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New Yorker staff writer Paige Williams delves into the riveting and sometimes perilous world of the international fossil trade through the true story of one man's devastating attempt to sell a Gobi Desert dinosaur skeleton from Mongolia, a nation that forbids trafficking in natural history. The first time Eric Prokopi saw T. bataar bones he was impressed. The enormous skull and teeth betrayed the apex predator's close relation to the storied Tyrannosaurus rex, the most famous animal that ever lived. Prokopi's obsession with fossils had begun decades earlier, when he was a Florida boy scouring for shark teeth and Ice Age remnants, and it had continued as he built a thriving business hunting, preparing, and selling specimens to avid collectors and private museums around the world. To scientists' fury and dismay, there was big money to be made in certain corners of the fossil trade. Prokopi didn't consider himself merely a businessman, though. He also thought of himself as a vital part of paleontology--as one of the lesser-known artistic links in bringing prehistoric creatures back to life--and saw nothing wrong with turning a profit in the process. Bone hunting was expensive, risky, controversial work, and he increasingly needed bigger "scores." By the time he acquired a largely complete skeleton of T. bataar and restored it in his workshop, he was highly leveraged and drawing quiet scorn from peers who worried that by bringing such a big, beautiful Mongolian dinosaur to market he would tarnish the entire trade. Presenting the skeleton for sale at a major auction house in New York City, he was relieved to see the bidding start at nearly $1 million--only to fall apart when the president of Mongolia unexpectedly stepped in to question the specimen's origins and demand its return. An international custody battle ensued, shining new light on the black market for dinosaur fossils, the angst of scientists who fear for their field, and the precarious political tensions in post-Communist Mongolia. The Prokopi case, unprecedented in American jurisprudence, continues to reverberate throughout the intersecting worlds of paleontology, museums, art, and geopolitics. In this gorgeous nonfiction debut, Williams uncovers an untold story that spans continents, cultures, and millennia as she grapples with the questions of who we are, how we got here, and who, ultimately, owns the past. More/less