Writers Writing Dying

C.K. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1936, and lives in Normandy, France. He has published a dozen books in Britain with Bloodaxe, including New & Selected Poems (1995), The Vigil (1997), Repair (1999) and The Singing (2003) - all four of these were Poetry Book Society Recommendations - followed by Collected Poems (2006), Wait (2010) and Writers Writing Dying (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, USA, 2012; Bloodaxe Books, 2013). Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987, Repair was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and The Singing won the National Book Award for 2003. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, and prizes from PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He published a memoir, Misgivings (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles' Women of Trachis, Euripides' Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. His book on Walt Whitman, On Whitman, was published by Princeton University Press in 2010. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is currently a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.

'A voice that has become utterly distinctive: restless, passionate, dogged, and uncompromising in its quest to find and speak the truth - an intelligence both compassionate and fierce - poems that delve into everything from the most joyous and private matters of the heart (he is one of our greatest love poets) to the chaos and horror of politics, warfare, and our species' seemingly innate penchant for cruelty and self-destruction - Few poets leave behind them a body of work that is global in its ambition and achievement, but C.K. Williams is one of them. His poetry will speak to future generations, as it does to us, of what it was to be human in our time' - Chase Twichell.