Williams wrote two picture books, Working Cotton (1992), which won the Caldecott Award of the American Library Association and a Coretta Scott King book award, and Girls Together (1997). For television, Williams wrote the programs Ours to Make (1973) and The Sherley Williams Special (1977). Williams published the groundbreaking critical study of African-American writing Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study of Neo-Black Literature in 1972. She was also selected to write the introduction for Zora Neale Hurston's 1991 edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God.
