Visiting Poet Phillip B. Williams • Thursday, September 30

Visiting Poet Phillip B. Williams • Thursday, September 30

Poet Phillip B. Williams will visit Mason virtually on Thursday, September 30, as part of the Fall 2021 Visiting Writers Series. In a Crowdcast event at 7:30 that evening, Williams will be in conversation with Mason MFA student Keene Carter. The series is hosted by Mason’s Creative Writing Program, University Libraries, and Watershed Lit.

Williams is the author most recently of Mutiny, released in early September by Penguin Books, which describes the collection as follows:

Mutiny: a rebellion, a subversion, an onslaught. In poems that rebuke classical mythos and western canonical figures, and embrace Afro-Diasporanfolk and spiritual imagery, Phillip B. Williams conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined and then, through a force and generosity of vision, propels himself into life, selfhood, and a path forward. Intimate, bold, and sonically mesmerizing, Mutiny addresses loneliness, desire, doubt, memory, and the borderline between beauty and tragedy. With a ferocity that belies the tenderness and vulnerability at the heart of this remarkable collection, Williams honors the transformative power of anger, and the clarity that comes from allowing that anger to burn clean.

Williams' earlier collection Thief in the Interior (2016) won both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award. He has also received a 2017 Whiting Award, a 2021 Literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. Williams is from Chicago, Illinois. He currently teaches at Bennington College and is a member of the founding faculty for the Randolph College low-residency MFA program in creative writing.

Register now at Crowdcast to save you spot for the event!

 

Mark your calendars as well for the rest of the visiting writers series ahead: