March 25, 2002

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams will be the guest poet at the University's 39th Wallace Stevens Poetry Program on April 3 and 4. The program will also feature poetry readings by the University students who won the Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest.

On Wednesday, April 3, Williams and the student poets will read in von der Mehden Recital Hall at 8 p.m. The April 4 reading will take place at noon at the Charter Oak Cultural Center, 21 Charter Oak Ave., Hartford. Both readings are free and open to the public.

Williams has published 14 books of poetry, including Lies; I Am the Bitter Name; Tar; The Vigil; and Love about Love. He has also written a memoir, Misgivings: My Father, My Mother, Myself. In 2000, he received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Repair. Williams is the recipient of many other awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, a PEN/Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

Williams, who says his aim is to find "exactly the relation between the most intimate self and the most public," has been praised by critic Edward Hirsch for being "a psychological poet as well as a poet responding to the character of a country at a given moment."

Williams is currently a professor of English and writing at Princeton University.

The Wallace Stevens Poetry Program is presented by UConn's English department, with support from The Hartford and the assistance of the Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens.