Nathan Kenneth Williams was born and raised in a Russian Orthodox family of American heritage. The son of a Russian Orthodox priest, he grew up assisting his father in his pastoral duties to the Russian community surrounding the small church in Richmond, Maine. People were the work of Nathan's father - a man whose ability to delve into and understand the minds and hearts of those around him became the ideal for which Nathan would strive in both his life and his work.

Home-schooled from birth to college, he read with a will everything within reach, from the great classics to adventure and comedy, developing a mighty vocabulary and an intuitive feel for linguistic styles. The elevated ecclesiastical language of the church services further served to enrich his understanding of both English and Slavic linguistic structure.

At eighteen he entered Holy Trinity Seminary in Jordanville, New York. Here he lived for several years in a community of monks and seminarians where Russian was the primary language of classes, coursework, and daily life. The education was geared towards a thorough understanding of Russian life and history. Here he likewise first began developing his skills as a translator, working for the monastery's own St. Job of Pochaev Press.

Five years later Nathan received his B.A. Theology, and went on to enroll in the Middlebury College Russian School graduate program. He lived in Moscow for a year, studying exchange student-style at the Russian State University for the Humanities. Here, along with other Russian subjects, he took formal courses in translation and Russian poetry, and studied Old Slavonic under the well-known lector and philologist Andrei Borisovich Morozov. Moscow likewise afforded the young translator the opportunity to walk the proverbial mile in the shoes of the nation whose language he had come to love and understand on a multitude of plains, not least of which was the romantic: the fall after receiving his M.A. Russian at Middlebury Nathan returned to Russia to marry Anna Buryakova of Ishim, Siberia, to whom he had become engaged during his studies in Moscow.

Today Nathan Williams is the owner and operator of Saints Cyril and Methodius Translation, as well as the choir director for the Russian parish he grew up in. His wife, Anna, is now his partner in business as well as in life. Herself a graduate of the Tyumen College of the Arts in Siberia and the daughter of a deacon of the Russian Church, Anna is the primary proofreader for all Russian-English translation, and the driving force behind SCMTranslation's indefatigable work ethic.