ONE LAST DANCE is a sweepingly elegant romance written by 92-year-old Mardo Williams

One Last Dance: It’s Never too Late to Fall in Love by Mardo Williams (written by him at age 92) won Best Regional Fiction for the Great Lakes region in the 2006 Independent Publisher Book Awards.

One Last Dance, set in Columbus, Ohio, is a story about finding love at any age. Morgan, 89, and Dixie, 79, two bickering seniors, move in together for economic reasons. Soon their business-only relationship deepens as they face illness, scandal and a near-fatal accident.

“A sweepingly elegant romance, One Last Dance celebrates the importance of living in the moment and never giving up in the search for love. Emotion and hope surge from the pages, in this novel that leaves the reader feeling invigorated and enthusiastic about life,” said Jim Cox, Midwest Book Review.

One Last Dance is also about human frailty. Dixie fears intimacy and Morgan hides details about his divorce, estranged children and lost job. When a grandson Morgan never knew reappears, he is forced to deal with his troubled past, which brings Dixie and Morgan closer together and closer to their fractured families.

The novel, One Last Dance, was written mostly by Columbus, Ohio, journalist Mardo Williams, who died in 2001 at age 95, and finished by his daughters, Kay Williams and Jerri Williams Lawrence. Mardo wrote much of One Last Dance in-and-out of hospital stays. Given his experience, he had a lot to say about the landscape of aging and what it means to have a young mind in an old body. Blind from macular degeneration, he was forced to dictate the last chapters of the first draft and passed away before his novel was published.

Months after his death Mardo Williams became the first posthumous recipient of an Ohioana Library Award for his body of work as author and journalist. In 2006 he was inducted into the Ohio Senior Citizens Hall of Fame.


The Independent Publisher Book Awards are intended to bring increased recognition to the thousands of exemplary independent and university titles produced each year; the IPPY rewards those who exhibit the courage, innovation, and creativity to bring about change in the world of publishing. The 2006 competition attracted more than 3,000 books from over 1,500 publishers around the world, including all 50 U.S. states, 7 Canadian provinces, and 16 foreign countries.

One Last Dance was also named a 2005 finalist for a National Readers’ Choice Award, Mainstream Category, sponsored by the Romance Writers of America.


For a review copy of One Last Dance: It’s Never too Late to Fall in Love or more information on the book and authors, please contact Eileen Wyman at Calliope Press.