She is the great-granddaughter of Arna Bontemps,[7] the African-American poet, novelist and noted member of the Harlem Renaissance,[8] and the granddaughter of Avon Williams, the Nashville lawyer and key leader of the city's civil rights movement.

One of her great-great-grandfathers was Edmund Pettus, a white US senator of Alabama, senior officer of the Confederate States Army and grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

Published by Random House in 2015, Soul Food Love: Healthy Recipes Inspired by One Hundred Years of Cooking in a Black Family is co-authored by Williams and her mother, the novelist Alice Randall.

According to the publisher, the book relates the authors’ family history (which mirrors that of much of black America in the 20th century), explores the often fraught relationship African-American women have had with food, and forges a powerful new way forward that honors their cultural and culinary heritage.

[16] In a review for the Nashville Scene, Erica Wright stated that the collection "does so with such grit, music and honesty that readers will find themselves rooting for the poet's theory — that Shakespeare once had a black lover and immortalized her in verse — to be true.

According to the publisher, the middle-grade fantasy book is the tale of one young woman's adventure to pass her Official Princess Test, discover a means of escape from her island, and reveal her true destiny.

In that essay, she stated, "modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.