C.K. Williams

C.K. Williams was the son of a salesman and a homemaker, born during the Depression. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and started writing poetry when he was 19. He began his career as a poet in the mid-1960s, after writing to a magazine editor about the violence directed against civil rights activists. The process of writing this letter led Williams to create a new paradigm for writing his poetry. The result was "A Day for Anne Frank," a meditation that linked the civil rights movement with the Holocaust and became the opening poem of his first collection, 'Lies' (1969). Since then, Williams has emerged as one of America's major poets, with over a dozen books of poetry and prose, winning a National Book Critics Circle Award for 'Flesh and Blood' (1987) and the Pulitzer Prize for 'Repair' (1999). He is known for his long, sinuous lines (often so long, they must be severed to fit on the page) and what one critic called his "novelistically urban" settings. Williams currently teaches at Princeton University, and divides his time between Princeton and Paris, France.