I’ve spent the past year writing a novel about Julia Williams, a young Black woman whose determination to become educated carried her through three schools in the 1830s, two of which were destroyed by racist mobs. Before deciding what to do with the novel, I’d like to share the first several chapters with Philanthropy Women readers and hear what you think. Does Julia’s story draw you in? What makes you want to keep reading? Where do you want to know more?

For context, here is a draft of an email to potential agents, so you can get a sense of the backstory for the manuscript:

I am seeking representation for A Dangerous Education, a work of historical YA fiction about Julia Williams Garnet, a young Black woman whose determination to become educated carried her through three schools, two of which were destroyed by racist mobs.

I first learned about Julia Williams through the renowned writer, feminist, and therapist Helen LaKelly Hunt, who encountered Julia while researching her doctoral thesis in theology. I became fascinated by this largely forgotten woman and, discovering that there were no known images of her, painted a portrait of Julia based on the historical record.

In August 2023, the National Park Service contacted me to ask whether it could use my portrait on its website’s page about Julia Williams Garnet. I was delighted to agree. After the 2024 election, the NPS undertook a major overhaul of its website, and Julia’s page disappeared for a time. When it eventually returned, my portrait was no longer there. Oddly enough, that experience stayed with me. It made me think about how easily the story of someone as remarkable as Julia could disappear again—and how much her story deserves to be known.

In February 2026, I began writing A Dangerous Education. Drawing extensively on primary sources and historical research, I followed Julia from her early education in Boston to Prudence Crandall’s Canterbury Female Boarding School in Connecticut, where she encountered both an extraordinary opportunity for education and increasingly violent opposition. When the school was forced to close, Julia did not give up. She traveled to Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, only to have that school destroyed by another racist mob. She ultimately completed her education at the Oneida Institute in New York.

The novel follows Julia as she emerges from these experiences as a young Black teacher and abolitionist. She becomes active in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and, in 1837, one of its four delegates to the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in New York. Her extraordinary educational journey becomes part of a larger story about the determination of Black women to claim education, intellectual freedom, and a public voice in a country determined to deny them all three.

I have approached the novel as both a work of historical imagination and an act of recovery. Julia Williams has often appeared in historical accounts primarily as the wife of the prominent abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet. I wanted instead to place Julia at the center of her own story: a woman whose education was interrupted again and again by racism, but who refused to allow those interruptions to determine the course of her life.

I am a writer, editor, and therapist with an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work and an MBA. I have previously self-published three books, including Feminist Giving: Creating New Frontiers in Social Change, and founded and edited Philanthropy Women, a publication focused on women’s philanthropy and social change.

So, please give me your thoughts about this evolving manuscript. Thanks for reading A Dangerous Education and, above all, I hope the story moves you like it did me as I began to know more about Julia.

A Dangerous Education

The Story of Julia Williams Garnet

By Kiersten Marek

Copyright ©2026, all rights reserved.

PART ONE

Canterbury Female Boarding School

Canterbury, Connecticut

 April 23, 1833

The sound of a stone hitting the schoolhouse window was enough to startle Julia into a sitting position. She clutched the edge of her desk, as if she might get up and flee the room, but then settled back, pressing her back hard against her chair. 

The glass of the window cracked, but did not break. For several moments, the students were all silent, pencils no longer scratching at paper, peering nervously around them at one another. Miss Crandall rose from her teacher’s desk and walked to the window, then paced back to the inside corner of the room, staring absently at the wood stove.

Then came the shouting outside.

“No Negro schools in Canterbury!”

“You jezebels think you can learn to read? You’ll bring us all to ruin with this nonsense!”

“Go back to Africa, you lazy pickaninnies!”

A roar of laughter followed. Julia lowered her eyes to the geography book open on her desk, though the words were now blurred beyond comprehension. Her fingers held so tightly to the corner of the page that the paper bent beneath her thumb.

At the front of the room, Miss Crandall had moved from the wood stove to stand perfectly still beside the blackboard, her hands clasped at her chest. She held herself with a kind of fearful stillness — the startled holding of stillness to try to remain calm.

Another stone hit the top frame of a window with a sharp thwack. A girl near the windows gasped, clutching the collar of her school uniform as if it might hold her in place. “Lord have mercy!” she cried.

“Please, Ladies,” said Miss Crandall.  “I know it’s difficult, but please mind yourselves and return your attention to the lesson.”

But no one could. Julia dared a glance toward the window. The crowd buzzed with chatter and moved around on the road just outside the gates of the school. There were perhaps a dozen men, and boys, too. There were farmers Julia recognized from town, many still in overalls and muddy boots from their day of work. There were shopkeepers she had seen before — one a butcher, the other an ironmonger.  There were also women, some of whom she had seen on the streets of town in passing. One was holding her shawl tightly around her shoulders, a pinched look on her face as if she was the one being attacked.

The people of Canterbury were standing out there like a flock of vultures, trying to intimidate them and make them go away, all because they were a handful of Negro girls seeking an education.

Julia swallowed hard and looked back down at her book. South America. Mountain ranges. River systems. The words had once felt like keys opening the world.  Now they seemed strangely fragile in the presence of the angry mob outside.

She thought suddenly of Boston, and of her family home — of her mother folding laundry beside the stove, and of her younger sisters laughing with their mouths full of oatmeal before being scolded for it. All the safety, all the normalcy of home. But she wasn’t home anymore. She was here, in Canterbury, where the townspeople were angry and wanted them gone.

Something crashed loudly against the front door downstairs. This time several girls cried out openly.

Miss Crandall set down her chalk. “Julia,” she said firmly, “would you please read to us about the geography of South America?”

Heat flooded Julia’s neck as the other girls turned toward her. She still got so nervous reading aloud. Back in Boston, her hands shook and her voice sometimes trembled in class when she read aloud, while the other girls would glance away politely, pretending not to notice.

Outside, someone shouted: “They think they’re equal to us!” A jeering peel of laughter followed.

Julia stood slowly, her knees weak beneath her, the book heavy in her hands. She knew what Miss Crandall was asking without saying it aloud: not simply to read, but to continue despite the cruelty outside, to act as though knowledge and learning still mattered.

Julia wet her lips. “The Andes Mountains,” she began softly, “extend along the western coast…”

A stone smashed fully through the window. Glass burst into the air and scattered across the classroom floor. Julia watched a large piece of glass slide past her desk and hit the inside wall of the room. She met the horror in the eyes of another girl.

But Julia returned to her reading. Her voice shook so badly she could barely hear the words herself, yet somehow she kept going.

“…through Peru and Bolivia, forming a steep backbone of mountain ranges that stretch across seven South American countries — ”

Another round of shouting came from outside, followed by more banging against the door.

But Julia continued to read, and somewhere beneath the terror in her chest, another feeling began to form — deep, hard, and less familiar. It was a feeling like anger, but also mixed with pride, and maybe even determination. It was a feeling like that word from the book about South America — backbone. 

Because they were not throwing stones at a building. They were throwing stones at girls with books. And for the first time in her life, Julia understood that learning could make people hate you, which meant it must also make you powerful.