Margaret Willson with a student at the Bahia Street Center

Margaret Willson is an award-winning author who has lived in diverse communities around the world. Dance Lest We All Fall Down brings together her experience writing for popular and academic audiences and makes her work as an anthropologist accessible to a broad cross-section of readers.

Margaret Willson left the United States at age 18 and spent five years working her way around the world in such jobs as fishing deckhand, abalone diver, farmhand, community development officer, and outdoor guide. She eventually returned to the United States where she completed an Anthropology B.A. and M.A. at Western Washington University in Washington State, focusing on Chinese and Mongolian studies. She studied creative writing with Pulitzer Prize Winner Annie Dillard and published a few short stories and a poem in literary journals, winning First Prize for Poetry in the Jeopardy Literary Contest.

In 1984, Willson left the U.S. again to do a PhD in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her thesis was on concepts of negotiation among Chinese traders of Papua New Guinea. She worked for the Royal Anthropological Institute as their Film Director and later worked in London (and overseas) as an anthropologist and associate producer of documentaries for British Channel Four. She received a fellowship to return to Papua New Guinea for research on the effects of media on non-literate societies. A visit to Brazil en route to this fellowship changed the focus of her research field – and her life.

Willson’s experiences in Brazil, chronicled in Dance Lest We All Fall Down, led to her co-found Bahia Street, a non-profit organization now based in three countries (Brazil, U.S., and U.K.) dedicated to breaking the cycles of poverty through education for impoverished girls. The project began with one orphaned girl and a borrowed room in 1998 and now has its own center in Brazil, serving sixty girls and their extended communities. Bahia Street’s programs include health and reproduction, nutrition, academic education, violence counseling, arts therapy, community literacy projects and microcredit lending. Six girls from the program, who were illiterate when they joined Bahia Street, have now entered university and one has graduated.

Willson has published a range of articles and books during her career. Recent publications include:

* Forthcoming 2009. “Incorporating an Anthropological Consciousness as a Model for Development,” in M. Bronson and T. Fields (Eds.). So What? Now What?: The Anthropology of Consciousness Responds to a World in Crisis, Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

* 2007. Dance Lest We All Fall Down, Cold Tree Press, Tennessee.

* 2005. “Indulgence,” in D. Kulick and A. Meneley (eds.) Fat: An Anthropology of an Obsession, Penguin Group Press, New York.

* 2002. “Race, Inequality and Gender in the Work of an NGO in Bahia, Brazil.” Practicing Anthropology, Vol 23, No.2.

* 2001. “Designs of Deception: Concepts of Consciousness, Spirituality, and Survival in Capoeira Angola in Salvador, Bahia.” Anthropology of Consciousness. Vol. 12, No.1.

* 1997. “Playing the Dance, Dancing the Game: Race, Sex and Stereotype in Anthropological Fieldwork” in Ethnos, August.

Her next literary project is a nonfiction book on a female Icelandic fishing captain who lived from 1777 to 1857.

Margaret Willson currently lives and works in Seattle.