Brockport Writer's Forum presents Poet C.K. Williams

Start: Nov 17 2010 7:30 pm

Poet and translator C.K. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1936 and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University and lives part of the year in Paris.

Best known for his pioneering use of long, prose-like lines, Williams is a versatile and wide-ranging poet whose work is intensely personal at times, documentary and socially aware at others. Peter Campion has observed that “like Yeats and Lowell before him, [Williams] writes from the borderland between private and public life”, while Paul Muldoon called him “one of the most distinguished poets of his generation”. Williams has translated into English the works of Francis Ponge, Adam Zagajewski, Issa, Euripides and Sophocles, and has written a memoir, a book of critical prose and a study of Walt Whitman.

He is recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the PEN/Voelker Career Achievement in Poetry Award, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, the Harriet Monroe Prize from the University of Chicago, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He has also received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.