Life
C. K. Williams grew up in Newark, New Jersey and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood. He later briefly attended Bucknell University and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn he studied with the romantic scholar, Morse Peckham, and spent a great deal of time in the circle of young architects who studied with and worked for the great architect Louis Kahn. In an essay, “Beginnings,” he acknowledges Kahn’s dedication and patience as essential to his notion of the life of an artist.
Williams lived for a period in Philadelphia, where he worked for a number of years as a part-time psychotherapist for adolescents and young adults, a ghost-writer and editor, then began teaching, first at the YM-YWHA in Philadelphia, then at several universities in Pennsylvania, Beaver College, Drexel, and Franklin and Marshall. He subsequently taught at many other universities, including Columbia, NYU, Boston University, the University of California, both at Irvine and Berkeley, before finally becoming a professor at George Mason University, then moving in 1995 to Princeton University, where he has taught poetry workshops and translation ever since.
He met his present wife, Catherine Mauger, a French jeweler, in 1973, and they have a son who is now a noted painter, Jed Williams. He has a daughter from an earlier marriage, Jessie Burns, who is a writer. He lives half the year near Princeton, and the rest in Normandy in France.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Read more about this topic: C. K. Williams
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“My life I never held but as a pawn
To wage against thine enemies’ nor fear to lose it,
Thy safety being motive.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“What’s terrible is that there’s nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
“It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)