Lisa Williamson Rosenberg Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Lisa Williamson Rosenberg is an author of literary fiction and a psychotherapist that is a specialist in racial identity, complex trauma, and depression.

The former ballet dancer has performed with the Pacific Northwest, Pennsylvania, and Boston ballet companies.

Williamson was born in New York City as the only child of white Ashkenazi Jewish teacher Lorraine Williamson and art director, and African American author Mel Williamson.

At the age of seven, she began dancing ballet and she was soon devoted to the art form. She went to New York City’s High School of Performing Arts and graduated in 1984.

She would then attend college for a time before she left to go dance in the 1986 – 1987 season with the New Orleans City Ballet. Working with Ivan Nagy her executive director, she performed “Les Sylphides” before she went back to college in 1989.

Lisa would then graduate from Princeton University with an English literature degree. She would then go back to professional dancing working with the Pennsylvania Ballet among other dancing companies.

Williamson Rosenberg loved dancing a lot and believed she would do it for the rest of her life. But as she got older, she had to retire and in 1997 she went to the School of Social Work at Hunter College, where she graduated with her master’s degree.

She would then get her post-graduate degree from the Ackerman Institute where she studied family therapy. In 1999, she got married to Lenox, Massachusetts-based Jonathan S. Rosenberg and the two have two children together.

As an author, she makes use f her training, education, and experience to write all manner of literary works that include essays and short stories.

Some of her essays have been published in the likes of “The Piltdown Review,” “Longreads,” “Literary Mama,” “Narrative.ly,” “The Common,” and “Mamalode.”

Rosenberg also blogs on her blog where she tells stories of being, motherhood, and identity that often include personal accounts of her time working as a ballet dancer.

She also tells of her struggles with her formation of a biracial identity, grappling with injuries, and eating disorders.

She published “Embers on the Wind” her debut novel in 2022 and used the popularity of that work to push on.

In addition to being nominated for the Pushcart Prize, she came in second at the Winter Short Story Contest held by The Piltdown Review.

Lisa Williamson Rosenberg has said that writing is something that she has always done ever since she was a child.

Her mother who died in 2018 was an avid educator and she was one of the early beta readers of her breakthrough work. Her father also read and critiqued the many essays and short fiction she wrote and told her that she would one day make a great author.

Coming from a brilliant storyteller and writer, this was high praise that gave her the motivation to continue pursuing writing as a career. She thus spent much of her life attempting to write novels and essays and talks.

As a black biracial woman, a talk she gave to a synagogue explaining her experiences on race was the first thing she ever published. She still remembers growing up in a very happy interracial family.
While her parents were very traditional, they tended to be progressive in many issues. As such, she had the luxury of living in a cross-cultural home where politics and race were part of the conversation at the dinner table.

She now makes use of these experiences to form her identity and inform her writing. The New York-born author currently makes her home in Montclaire New Jersey.

“Embers on the Wind” by Lisa Williamson Rosenberg sees the present and the past converge. It is a serpentine and enthralling tale of women linked by histories that go back centuries, the legacy of slavery, and motherhood.
It is set in the middle of the nineteenth century when Whittaker House in Massachusetts had been doubling up as a secret stop on the Underground Railroad.

It is the place where Clementine and Little Annie who are two freedom seekers had hidden and lost their lives. The house is still standing and the memories of Clementine and Little Annie are still in the minds of many.

Whittaker House has now been made into a vacation rental but it has recently been attracting seekers of a very different kind. Most of the people who frequent the place are black women who only seem free.
Among them is a single mother named Dominique who is at the house looking for information about an ancestor.

Dominique’s love Michelle is at the house to heal from some painful trauma. Then there is Michelle’s sister Kaye who sees visions that reveal information from the future and the past in addition to her own.
The women will only experience true liberation when they reconnect with their history within Whittaker House.