C.K. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1936 and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently teaching in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University and lives part of the year in Paris.
In 1987 Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Flesh and Blood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. In 1992 FSG published A Dream of Mind and in 1996The Vigil, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Williams is the author of four other volumes of poems: Lies (1969), I Am the Bitter Name (1972), With Ignorance (1977), and Tar (1983), which are collected in Poems: 1963-1983 (1988). In 1994 FSG published his Selected Poems, which includes three decades of his poetry from previous volumes and thirteen new poems. Mr. Williams is the author of three works in translation: Sophocles' Women of Trachis (with Gregory Dickerson, 1978); The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling (Poems from Issa) (1983); and The Bacchae of Euripides (1990).
Mr. Williams has received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1989), a Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award (1992), the Harriet Monroe Prize from Poetry magazine (1993), the PEN/Voelker Career Achievement in Poetry Award (1998), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (1999). He has also received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.