Rhonda Gail Williford was born in 1951 in Seat Pleasant, Maryland. An excellent student with a voracious mind, she received a full scholarship to C. W. Post University in Long Island, New York and went on to study law at William and Mary, in Virginia. She had a strong sense of justice and as an attorney, she made battling injustice the focus of her career, working for more than three decades as a labor lawyer at the National Labor Relations Board. In spite of receiving consistently good performance reviews, she was forced out of the NLRB before she could retire with a full pension, a trend in the agency at the time. In her forced early retirement, she began investigating issues of workplace abuse, attending conferences internationally to understand the patterns of abuse and ways to fight against it.

Rhonda was known throughout the Washington, DC area as poet and intellectual. She published a chapbook of poems, One Wide Sky, in the 1997 and continued to publish poems in the years that followed, including in Folio, Beltway Quarterly, Plum Review, Beauty for Ashes, Bellowing Ark, and Innisfree. She ran the Takoma Park poetry reading series and founded and ran the poetry book
group at Politics and Prose bookstore for fifteen years. Sharing her time and talents generously,
Rhonda volunteered as a reader for prominent DC-area poetry contests and she was a first
reader for many poets of their own manuscripts. She excelled as problem solver, both in
matters artistic and material.

Rhonda was a life-long seeker, acquiring an enormous amount of knowledge on subjects as
varied as Czech literature, the Torah, French prosody, ancient classical writers, and textile art.
She amassed a collection of some 6,000 books. For twenty-five years, she was member of the
Jung Society of Washington, where for several years she served on the board of directors. In her
frequent, nearly nightly presence at and participation in the society’s programs, according to
the society’s president, her contributions were deeply thoughtful, heartfelt, and delivered with
passion. When illness began to change and threaten her body, she continued to bring to
programs her courage, her anger, and her insightfulness, and even an often-unexpected, wildish humor that is said to have filled the room and spilled out the door and down the corridor. She is remembered for having brought her whole soul.  

A lover of the arts and a frequent visitor to art museums throughout the region, she shared her passions and knowledge with a wide network of friends. She died of cancer on November 18, 2022, in the company of her beloved friends.

THE WITNESS

And this gingko goes all the way back
to the first tree--maybe the tree that Adam
lay under, even before the naming,

tossing with some dream--feathery nests,
shining water--traveling toward an image
of Eve which couldn't match the flame-
leaf on fired-maple that she was,

and Eve, unfurling from some unpaired
rib, stirred beneath a mirror-dream--
more smoke and tremor than vision,
and this also not quite Adam, that stretch
of God's imagination, not her own.

And this old gingko, from wet-curled roots,
overflows mid-air into a wide lap
for all the coming stories--the blood, iron,
and tinsel--rippling as it catches,
then releases, shimmer and shadow.

And now, Adam, with hand on thigh,
considers, while Eve sighing, leans
breath toward words--their bodies,
not yet touching, arch to start all

history--under the gingko tree,
casting, in a shake of leaf,
light, dark, light.

(First published in Innisfree)

Rhonda from the back of her chapbook

Rhonda’s Still Life painting