A well-known speaker and writer about the teaching of writing, her own novels include A Space Apart, Higher Ground, Only Great Changes, Trespassers, Oradell at Sea, and Their Houses. Her short story collections include In the Mountains of America,Dwight's House and Other Stories, and Out of the Mountains. Her work has been praised in periodicals like The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and The San Francisco Chronicle. She has won major awards including literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and her fiction has won prizes like the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and the West Virginia Library Association Award, as well as the for fiction. An early writer-in-the-schools with Teachers and Writers Collaborative, she has turned many of her experiences teaching writing into three books for teachers and writers and three novels for children. She also wrote the highly praised how-to-write book Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel. She is a past Distinguished Teaching Artist of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Personal Fiction Writing: A Guide to Writing from Real Life for Teachers, Students, and Writers
Blazing Pencils: A Guide to Writing Fiction and Essays
Deep Revision: A Guide for Teachers, Students, and Other Writers
Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel
Selected commentary on Meredith Sue Willis
Sarah Dufaure, "A life of ‘Unfinished Business’: Cursed Inheritance and Blessed Heritage in Meredith Sue Willis’s Oradell at Sea," Thy Truth Then Be Thy Dowry: Questions of Inheritance in American Women’s Literature, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, pp. 199-211.
Keith Maillard, "Gaining the Higher Ground: An Appreciation,” Appalachian Heritage: A Literary Magazine of the Southern Appalachians, Vol. 34, No. 4, Fall 2006, p. 38.
Nathan Leslie, “Meredith Sue Willis Interviewed by Nathan Leslie,” Main Street Rag, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2006.
Belinda Anderson, “Meredith Sue Willis at Ease: An Interview with the author of Oradell at Sea” Artworks, Winter 2002-2003, p. 5.
Gina Herring, “Politics and Men: What's ‛Really Important' About Meredith Sue Willis and Blair Ellen Morgan,” Appalachian Journal,, Volume 25, Number 4, Summer 1998, pp. 414–422.
Thomas E. Douglass, “A View from Higher Ground: Meredith Sue Willis and the Appalachian Renaissance,” The Iron Mountain Review: Meredith Sue Willis Issue, Volume XII, Spring 1996, pp. 13–18.
Tal Stanley, “Making That New Place: Blair Morgan's Coming of Age and Meredith Sue Willis's Social Vision,” The Iron Mountain Review: Meredith Sue Willis Issue, Volume XII, Spring 1996, pp. 19–25.
Jack L. Wills, “The Story's the Thing: The Power of Narrative in In the Mountains of America,” The Iron Mountain Review: Meredith Sue Willis Issue, Volume XII, Spring 1996, pp 26–30.
Thomas E. Douglass, “Interview with Meredith Sue Willis,” Appalachian Journal, Volume 20, Number 2, Spring 1993, pp. 284–293.
Nancy Carol Joyner, “The Poetics of the House in Appalachian Fiction,” in The Poetics of Appalachian Space, ed. Parks Lanier, Jr.,.
Barbara Melosh, “Historical Memory in Fiction: The Civil Rights Movement in Three Novels,” Radical History # 40, January 1988, pp. 64–76.
Ken Sullivan, “Gradual Changes: Meredith Sue Willis and the New Appalachian Fiction,” Appalachian Journal 14, 1986, pp. 38–45.
Leslie Hanscom, “Looking Back Upon A Summer in VISTA; Leslie Hanscom Talks With Meredith Sue Willis,” Newsday, February 3, 1985, p. 18.
