About

Long before she wrote her first novel, Williamaye Jones spent her days sending other people to fall in love with a place.

For ten years, she worked as a travel advisor—building itineraries for travelers standing at the start of a trip they'd remember for the rest of their lives. Where to stay in Florence so the morning light comes in right. Which unmarked road out of a hill town nobody photographs but everybody remembers. She learned, one traveler at a time, that the difference between a good trip and an unforgettable one has less to do with the itinerary than with a handful of moments a good guide knows to point toward—and then get out of the way of.

She's been doing some version of that work ever since. The tools just changed.

With more than twenty-five years in publishing—including nearly two decades as a freelance editor for Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Sterling Publishing, across more than 1,200 books—Williamaye has spent most of her career studying what makes a story hold a reader, from inside the industry that makes books. That same editorial eye now shapes her own fiction: the Villa Fiorita novella series, an epic historical novel set in Renaissance Italy, and forthcoming work exploring Europe's history, its legends, and the women both tend to leave out.

Her novels keep returning to Italy—the political intrigue of the Renaissance, the quiet hills of modern Tuscany—not because she ran out of places to set a story, but because that's where she keeps finding the ones only she can tell. She also hosts Lust Through the Ages, a conversation series revisiting the books history tried to forget, or was too embarrassed to keep discussing.

These days, the travel advisor and the novelist have started working together again. Williamaye is building literary journeys: trips that follow the roads, cafés, and hill towns that show up in her fiction, so readers can stand in the actual place a scene was written about and see it, for a little while, through her eyes. Not a guidebook tour. The kind of trip where the place and the story finally meet.

She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University and a BA in Literature from UNC-Asheville, and after twenty-five years of other people's books—and a few of her own—she still believes the best stories leave you wanting to book a plane ticket.