Thursday, February 1, 7:00 PM

"If C. K. Williams has a method-in his poetry, and now in his prose-it is to crack and then fracture the façade of the so-called real with the hammer blows of exacerbated consciousness, delivering ever more surely, stroke by stroke, the sense, once voiced in a poem by Jorie Graham, that 'there is no deep enough.'"

-Sven Birkets

Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Repair, C. K. Williams is the author of fifteen collections of poetry as well as numerous translations and, most recently, a memoir, Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself. As David Lehman puts it, "Williams is adept at truncated narratives and impromptu meditations, flesh-and-blood memories, abstractions made sensuous." Known for his stylistic innovations (extra-long lines are a trademark of his later poems), his work "manages to be at once wistful and robust, philosophical and bewildered" (Booklist). In addition to other awards, he has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Flesh and Blood in 1987 and the PEN/Voelker Career Achievement Award in 1998. A native of Newark, New Jersey, Williams has taught English and creative writing at Princeton University since 1996.