Biography
Fred Willard grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. Where he attended Brown University, emerging to become a news photographer with the Marietta Daily Journal. This brought him in close contact with the customs and habits of derelicts, criminals, eccentrics and politicians, perhaps too close...
As he puts it on his own website:
"During this period, I also developed the hobby of talking to boneheads in bars and other locations of similar social stature. In 1989, I realized that I wasn't just talking to boneheads -- I had become one."
His response was to clean up his act and sober up, only to be struck down by a disabling arthritic condition, a situation seems
perversely to have contributed to him taking up fiction. The subject he chose to write about was that which was familiar to him, the characterful low life of Atlanta, Georgia. The result was Down on Ponce, a first novel about a collection of losers, dealers, and psychos which has been described as a 'dazzling debut' and which won him the Georgia Author of the Year award for Best First Novel.
Ponce
The title of his first novel comes from the Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta, named after the Spanish conqueror and explorer who in the early sixteenth century claimed and named Florida, meaning 'Land of Flowers'. In Atlanta, the Ponce de Leon Avenue has been more 
renowned for the exotic fauna of its nightlife and lowlife than for its flowers, although there are apparently now signs that the area is moving more 'upmarket', with land prices booming, attracting investors and driving the poorer residents out of the area. Fortunately this hasn't affected Fred Willard, who has now completed his new novel, Princess Naughty and the Voodoo Cadillac.
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Fred Willard published by No Exit Press Princess Naughty And The Voodoo Cadillac
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