OCEANSIDE, CA, September 22, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to name Elizabeth Yahn Williams a Lifetime Achiever. An accomplished listee, Ms. Williams celebrates many years' experience in her professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes she has accrued in her field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
After careers in the law, education, and higher learning, Ms. Williams now devotes herself full-time to writing and managing her own production company, Guidelights Productions, which has been dedicated to various media since 1996, but currently emphasizes the publication of beautiful bi-lingual poetic artbooks. She believes her various professions have always been connected, and feels lucky she was able to design her own job. Ms. Williams is proud of receiving both the 2017 Mom's Choice Award for Excellence in Family-Friendly Media and the Florida Authors and Publishers President's Award for Poetry for the Spanish volume in her "HAIKU for an Artist" series. With their pages featuring colorful art as the focus of their short poems, she feels the books are a very welcoming introduction to new languages.
Born to Wilbert Henry and Elizabeth Dulson Yahn in Columbus, Ohio, Ms. Williams always wanted to be a writer, actress and teacher since she was small. She attended a Catholic school and taught the class when the nun left the classroom. To that end, Ms. Williams earned a BA, cum laude, from Loyola Marymount University and a secondary teaching credential from the University of California, Los Angeles. She became a teacher with the city's school district, and joined La Puente High School District in California in 1965. Teaching a myriad of courses, Elizabeth's preferred subject was English.
Ms. Williams' father was a CEO, well known for his skills in arbitration; so she became interested in law, getting her J.D. at Loyola University, Los Angeles, in 1971. As an intern at Garvey, Ingram, Baker and Uhler in Covina, CA, she became the first law student admitted to the Pomona Superior Court to try a case under the New Rules of Professional Conduct in 1970. Some of the firm's work included class action litigation, so that led Elizabeth to become part of the Century City Bar Association's Committee that wrote the first rules for that genre as litigated in the Los Angeles Superior Court. Also, as a lawyer at Avco Financial Services and then in private practice in Newport Beach, she learned insolvency law and became so adept at it that she taught other lawyers and judges through various local and state bar association committees, including the State of California's Continuing Education of the Bar and Federal Courts Committee. She also briefly taught arbitration law at Western State University.
As for writing and the arts, Ms. Williams worked from 2008 to 2016 as co-editor of the Escondido Arts Partnership's award-winning Ekphrastic series, SUMMATION: The Merging of Art and Poetry. That project inspired a six-part TV film entitled: Creative Collaborations. Elizabeth is an accomplished curriculum developer, poet, playwright and lyricist. In the last quarter century, several of her one-act plays and a musical and a medley have been performed throughout California in various schools, colleges, churches and libraries and into Arizona at the Sedona Performing Arts Center. On a grant from KOCT in 1996, she wrote and hosted the "Guidelights for Success" mini-series that was a Telly Finalist and ran for six years on their cable station. She has also directed some small theatrical church and community companies in Orange and San Diego counties. In 2005 she met her performance partner, Bob Lundy, while teaching creative writing at the Solana Beach Library's Frank Craig Poetry Club that he co-founded. They perform as the team of HITHER & YAHN, and as such, initiated "Downtown Verse" in 2012 for the San Diego County Public Libraries. As an actress, her community theatre roles have also included the playing of two parts in the classic, "The Sound of Music." She has been interviewed on such shows as "Women" and "Action Now." Elizabeth also served as Librarian and a member of the Board of Directors for the National League of American Pen in Washington, D.C., from 2012-2015.
Ms. Williams is a member of Poets INC (Inland North County), co-founder of the California Women Lawyers, co-founder of the human rights section of the Orange County Bar Association, and a lifetime most distinguished honorary member of Phi Theta Kappa, for which she served as a mentor at MiraCosta College for five years. She is the recipient of grants from the Queen Mary College of the University of London, England, and Loyola Marymount University (faw Marymount College, P.V.E.), the Virginia Center of Creative Arts in France, the SLS of Montreal, the Ford Foundation, and the National Audio Theatre Foundation, and has been named a 1999 writing scholar of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, a 2000 Book Expo Publishing University Scholar, and a 1959 French Scholar of Ohio State University. Ms. Williams was selected for inclusion in numerous volumes of Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in the West, and Who's Who of American Women, as well as the 1998 to 1999 volume of Who's Who in Entertainment.
In recognition of outstanding contributions to her profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Ms. Williams has been featured on the Marquis Who's Who Lifetime Achievers website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
About Marquis Who's Who :
Since 1899, when A. N. Marquis printed the First Edition of Who's Who in America , Marquis Who's Who has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Today, Who's Who in America remains an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians and executive search firms around the world. Marquis publications may be visited at the official Marquis Who's Who website at www.marquiswhoswho.com.
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