Meredith Sue Willis was born in Harrison County, West Virginia, into a family of school teachers. Her parents were teachers, and all four of her parents' siblings were teachers. Even her grandfather Morgan Willis taught for a while--with an eighth grade education.

MSW started college at Baptist-founded Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, but dropped out to be a VISTA--a Volunteer in Servce to America. (See her novel Only Great Changes). She then transferred to Barnard College because she wanted to be in New York City. There she participated in the 1968 anti-racist, anti-war sit-ins at Columbia University. (See Trespassers).

She workedk many years as a writer-in-the-schools with the seminal artists-in-the-schools organization, Teachers & Writers Collaborative. MSW continued this work in New York and New Jersey for many decades, and has written four nonfiction books about writing and teaching writing.

Her first novel, A Space Apart, was published in 1979 by Charles Scribner's Sons. She has won many prizes for her work, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction Writing and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. She was a Distinguished Teaching Artist of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from West Virginia University. She presently teaches novel writing to adults at the School of Professional Studies at New York University and gives private classes online and in person.

MSW was a founding member and twenty-five year activist with the intentional integration organization, the South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race. She continues to chair the Social Action Committee of the Ethical Culture Society of Essex County, New Jersey.

She is married to Andrew B. Weinberger, a retired rheumatologist and present Board member at several institutions in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts and New Jersey. They live in Orange, New Jersey.

Their son Joel Weinberger, born 20 years to the day after their first date, is a software engineer in security at the AI company-with-a-conscience, Anthropic. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Sarah, an expert in the delivery of health care, and their children Shira (10), Eli (7), and Lev (5).