Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet C. K. Williams to Receive Corrington Award for Literary Excellence Oct. 25 at Centenary College of Louisiana

SHREVEPORT, LA -- The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C. K. Williams will receive the 12th annual John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence and read from his work at Centenary College on Thursday, Oct. 25.  The ceremony will take place at 7 p.m. in the Smith Building's Kilpatrick Auditorium on the Centenary campus.  Sponsored by the Student Government Association and the English Department, the event is free and open to the public.

The author of numerous volumes of poetry, Williams may be best known for Tar, which Random House published in 1983.  In this influential book, Williams perfected a characteristic style whose features include long lines, everyday language, and urban images.  Williams often writes about
the down-and-out in decaying cities.  His poems also explore the complex relationship between parents and children and husbands and wives.  His most recent volume of poetry, Repair, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

Williams's 1994 Selected Poems is his most comprehensive single volume.  Spanning 25 years, it includes poems from seven previously published books and 13 new poems.  The critic James Marcus called Williams's Selected Poems "a superb distillate of his work" and observed: "It tracks his development from an Angry (no, make that Apoplectic) Young Man of the '60s, assembling cluster bombs of imagery in the basement, into the Middle-Aged Wizard of the last decade, whose endless, intricate lines seem scarcely adequate to contain their payload of perception and experience."
 
Williams is most recently the author of a memoir, Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself, published last year.  He is also the translator of a popular version of The Bacchae, a play by the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides.

Born in 1936 in Newark, N.J., Williams was educated at the University of Pennsylvania.  He has taught writing and literature at Columbia University in New York City and at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.  Since 1996, he has been a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

In addition to the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Repair, Williams has received the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for Flesh and Blood and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974.

Previous recipients of the Corrington Award were Eudora Welty, Ernest J. Gaines, James Dickey, Miller Williams, Lee Smith, Paul Auster, Elizabeth Spencer, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, Eleanor Wilner, and Richard Powers.

The Corrington Award is named for the Centenary alumnus and author of the short novel "Decoration Day" who died in 1988.  The award takes the form of a bronze medal designed by the internationally acclaimed Louisiana sculptor Clyde Connell.

A unique feature of the award is that all first-year students at Centenary read a book by the recipient.  For several years, Williams's version of The Bacchae has been an important book in the fall semester
First-Year Experience.  This year students are reading, in addition to The Bacchae, Williams's Selected Poems.

For further information, contact Dr. David Havird, Department of English, 318-869-5085 or 869-5254.

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