About C. K. Williams
Charles Kenneth Williams, known as C. K. Williams is an American poet, essayist, translator and university professor, born on November 4, 1936 in Newark, New Jersey and died on September 20, 2015 in Hopewell, New Jersey, as a result of cancer. He is the author of numerous books of poetry as well as translations. He taught creative writing at Princeton University. In 2003 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2004 to 2010.He published his first collection of poetry, Lies, in 1969 with the help and support of Anne Sexton, followed by more than 20 poetry and prose collections. His writing is in the tradition of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, and crossed by the great moments of American social life: civil rights, assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, etc. Ethical questions are present in all his work. His book Repair won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, and in 2003 The Singing won the National Book Award. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. He also wrote essays, plays, children books and worked on translations. His last book of poetry, Falling Ill, was published in 2017, after his death.
C. K. Williams is also a translator of Sophocles, Euripides, Adam Zagajewski and Francis Ponge.
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