Marianne Williamson

Marianne Deborah Williamson is an American author, spiritual leader, and political activist. She has written 14 books, including four New York Times number-one bestsellers in the "Advice, How To, and Miscellaneous" category. The founder of Project Angel Food, a volunteer food delivery program that serves home-bound people with HIV/AIDS and life-threatening illnesses.

She is also the co-founder of the Peace Alliance, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization supporting peacebuilding projects. She has frequently appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 2014, Williamson unsuccessfully ran as an independent representing California's 33rd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives.

On January 9, 2019, she announced her campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election and suspended her campaign on January 10, 2020. She later endorsed Bernie Sanders at a rally in Austin, Texas, on February 23, 2020. She was hired as a columnist for Newsweek shortly after the campaign's conclusion. She has formed an exploratory campaign for running in the 2024 democratic presidential primaries.

Williamson was born in Houston, Texas, in 1952. She was the youngest of three children of Samuel "Sam" Williamson, a World War II veteran and immigration lawyer, and Sophie Ann Kaplan, a homemaker and community volunteer.

Williamson was raised upper-middle-class in Conservative Judaism. Her family attended Congregation Beth Yeshurun. She learned about world religions and social justice at home but became interested in speaking from the pulpit on social matters when she saw her rabbi speak against the Vietnam War. Her family also traveled internationally during the summers when she was a child. She has said that it was through travel that she "had an experience, at a young age, that people are the same everywhere."

Williamson attended Houston ISD's Bellaire High School. After graduating, she spent two years studying theater and philosophy at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where she was a roommate of eventual film producer Lynda Obst. In 1973, Williamson – an active antiwar protester – dropped out of college and lived "a nomadic existence" during what she calls "her wasted decade." She moved to New Mexico, took classes at the University of New Mexico, and lived in a geodesic dome with her boyfriend. The couple broke up a year later. Marianne then moved to Austin, Texas, where she took classes at the University of Texas.

After leaving Texas, she went to New York City, intending to pursue a career as a cabaret singer, but got distracted by "bad boys and good dope." Vanity Fair wrote that Williamson "spent her twenties in a growing state of existential despair." In New York, Williamson suffered from deep depression following the end of a relationship. She has said that this experience gave rise to a desire to spend the rest of her life helping people.