Dixie Browning

Founder, 1973 President

Daughter of a major league ball player, granddaughter of a sea captain. Dixie is a painter, writer and businesswoman. Known primarily for her watercolors, Dixie’s work hangs in many private corporation and museum collections, including those of the US Coast Guard Museum, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co, Duke Medical Center, Statesville (NC) Museum of Arts, and Science, Integon Corp, NCNB, Wachovia Bank, Rachel Maxwell Moore Art Foundation, Z Smith Reynolds Foundation Southport (NC) Municipal Collection and the collections of writer Nora Roberts and actor Andy Griffith.

She was co-founder and served on the board of directors Art Gallery Originals in Winston Salem from 1968 through 1975. Her work has appeared on the cover of the National Moravian Magazine, and in 1966 she illustrated NC Parade, (UNC Press) a book of short historical stores for children. She wrote the introduction to Artists/USA, 79-80 edition (Foundation for the Advancement of Artists, Phila) and helped organize the Watercolor Society of North Carolina serving as its first president.

Dixie’s writing career began in 1976 when she wrote a weekly newspaper column on art. Her first two romantic novels were written in ‘76 and published in ’77 by Thomas Bouregy, Inc. Since then, she has written more than sixty contemporary romances for Silhouette and worked on her fourteenth historical co-written with her sister Mary Williams for Topaz (Dutton-Signal) as Bronwyn Williams.

Among her awards for excellence in writing is a coveted RITA, given annually by Romance Writers of America, an international organization of romance writers for the best short contemporary, three first place awards and one third prize for book length fiction for North Carolina Press Club’s annual competition, and three first place awards in National Federation of Press Women’s annual competition for the contemporaries written under her name. Awards for historical romances published by Harlequin and Dutton-Signet’s Topaz imprint include three Maggies awarded by the Georgia Romance Writers a chapter of RWA a first and a second place in the North Carolina Press Club awards and a third prize in the National Federation of Press Women.

She was born in Elizabeth City, grew up at nearby Hatteras where many of her books have been set. Her father’s family has lived in the area since the early seventeenth century and one of her ancestors Caleb Williams is reputed to have washed ashore on Hatteras Island from a shipwreck in 1590, married an Indian woman and given her the Christian name of Sarah all of which is provided a ready source of material for the Bronwyn Williams historicals.

"Optimism"