Robin Williams

Robin Patricia Williams (born October 9, 1953) is an American educator who has authored many computer-related books, as well as the book Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? Among her computer books are manuals of style The Mac is Not a Typewriter and numerous manuals for various macOS operating systems and applications, including The Little Mac Book.

Williams was born in Berkeley, California. She grew up in San Jose and Fremont, California, and graduated from Washington High School in Fremont. After high school, she worked in hospitals and then traveled to Europe for two years. She moved to Santa Rosa, California, to attend a graphic design program at Santa Rosa Junior College, and began teaching graphic design at the college in 1981. In 2011, she received an MA degree from Brunel University, London, in Shakespeare Authorship studies, and in 2014 she completed a doctoral dissertation for the same university; her doctorate is on the history (and future) of reading Shakespeare—out loud and in community, with an emphasis on editorial practice.

Williams is a graphic designer, typographer, author, college instructor, and lecturer. She began writing in the 1980s after teaching graphic design and a course about the Mac computer at a California community college. She has taught Shakespeare at Santa Fe Community College and leads the Shakespeare Close Readers reading and discussion groups about individual plays. She has been a leader in the New Mexico Internet Professionals Association and the Santa Fe Mac Users Group. She is a founder of the Mary Sidney Society and read Shakespeare.

She has three children she raised as a single mother, including while working as a part-time instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College. She has written, designed, indexed, and produced more than seventy computer-related books, and by 2005, many of her books had been translated into twenty-three languages. Some of her early works include The Little Mac Book, and The Mac is Not a Typewriter. By 2002, The Little Mac Book had published its eighth edition. By 2005, she had published 51 books about Mac computers.

Williams has spent years studying William Shakespeare and, in 2006, issued her book Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? in which she presented evidence in support of the theory that the writer Mary Sidney is the author of Shakespeare's work. Mary Sidney was first proposed as an authorship candidate as part of a group theory by Gilbert Slater in 1931.