September Williams, MD is a Black American physician-writer, bioethicist, and filmmaker. Her work promotes narrative inquiry in bioethics through stories that are diverse, humanitarian, and scientifically imbued.

Dr. Williams’ concern about environmental degradation, related to the health of those most vulnerable to illness and premature death, resulted in her authoring Chasing Mercury. Chasing Mercury is a multicultural romance suspense about families committed to human rights and environmental justice while battling mercury poisoning. It is the first novel of the ‘Chasing Mercury Toxic Trilogy’ with the upcoming books being Weighing Lead and Mining Gold.

September Williams is also a breastfeeding advocate and the author of The Elephant in the Room: Bioethical Concerns in Human Milk Banking. The book evolved from a collaboration built through a clinical ethics consultation. However, Dr. Williams is interested in finding—and writing reviews about—  bioethical threads in written and screen narratives as she is in creating stories so endowed. All of September's work ultimately aims to improve our health by promoting platforms allowing a better understanding of and between ourselves. 

Though born in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, September is a graduate of the University of Winnipeg Collegiate Division and has a Bachelor of Science in Zoology from the University of Manitoba, Canada. During that period her worldview was shifted. The understanding of the relationship between First Nation peoples in North America and the struggles of colonized people worldwide became apparent. The support for shared humanitarian concerns resulted significant expansion of Dr. Williams’ world view. 

Returning to the USA, September Williams attended Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska. Initially, the choice was made to keep a short flight distance from family in Canada. However, it turned out to be a good one because the ethical challenges she continually posed— from racism to nuclear war— were taken seriously in the Jesuit tradition of the university and its medical school. In her early years in medical school, she was encouraged to continue dance classes as she had at the school of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and before.

September’s post-graduate medical background is broad. Her internship was in Family Medicine, followed by an internal medicine residency— both at Cook County Hospital, Chicago in the 1980s. This set her goals as a “cradle to the grave,” doctor who has spent most of her career working at the edges of life in underserved communities. Dr. Williams was a surgical intensive care-based American Society for Parental and Enteral Nutrition (ASPEN) fellow at Rosalind Franklin University. She was a  Lowell T. Coggeshall Fellow at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. There, Dr.Williams had the honor of being mentored by the late Drs. Marian Gray Secundy Ph.D., Stephen Toulmin Ph.D., and Carol Stocking, Ph.D. Being “raised” in bioethics by the aforementioned and by Drs. Mark Siegler, Md, John Lantos Md, and Annette Dula, Ph.D. had a profound influence on September’s clinical and creative trajectory. 

Dr. September Williams was the first clinical medical ethicist and communications director of the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care—during the inaugural year after the U.S. Presidential apology, made by President William Jefferson Clinton, for the United States Public Health Services Syphilis Study at Tuskegee, Alabama.

Believing that all sciences, including medicine, are prima facia humanitarian conduits, Dr. Williams chose to hone her creative tools. She studied screenwriting and directing in the MFA programs at Columbia College Chicago and Boston University, while still working ER shifts, and raising a family (who may even forgive her someday). During the inception of the Zora Neal Hurston Center for the Documentary, Dr. Williams was a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute Fellow in Black Film. It was then that she began consulting in bioethics for film and television-realizing what was missing in the stories. 

Filmmaker Williams was subsequently contracted to create trigger tapes for teaching models on end-of-life care for African Americans in a project funded by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation - Last Miles of the Way Home. Nearly twenty years later a single film with the same theme was developed for open-source educational viewing culled from the hundreds of hours of footage Ninth Month Productions documented (and has made it available on this website.) 

Having landed back in the San Francisco Bay Area, thirty-five years after she left as a child, Dr. Williams was awarded an HRSA Clinical Fellowship in Geriatric Medicine (the University of California, in San Francisco.) She retired early from inpatient clinical work after many years in the San Francisco City and County Health System, Laguna Honda Hospital—God’s Hotel.

Dr. September Williams is a member of the International Federation of Journalists; National Writers Union; American Public Health Association; the American Medical Association, and the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities; and in 2021 began a three-year term on the Advisory Board of the American Journal of Bioethics. She has been a film reviewer for the Raw Science Film Festival and others and often is flagged to review films that others believe may support Dr. Williams’ narrative quests. 

September Williams is also the founding board member of the nonprofit 501C3, Ninth Month Consults, which supports and resources bioethics relevant social and narrative projects—actual, written, and on-screen. This is often done in conjunction with Cove International Publishers and Ninth Month Productions. 

Dr. September Williams, has two millennial adult children and lives in Northern California, where she does bioethics consults, writes, reviews, makes films, and rows waters related to the San Francisco Bay.