Major American Poet To Present Silverman Reading At UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- C.K. Williams, award-winning contemporary American poet and translator, will present the 23rd annual Oscar Silverman Memorial Poetry Reading at 8 p.m. Nov. 12 in 250 Baird Hall on the UB North Campus.

The event, part of the UB Poetics Program's "Wednesday at 4 PLUS" literary series, will be free of charge and open to the public.

The reading will be presented in memory of Oscar Silverman, the distinguished UB scholar and teacher who chaired the Department of English and directed the University Libraries. Silverman also helped to develop UB's remarkable collection of 20th-century poetry.

Williams, who teaches English and writing at Princeton University, is viewed by readers and critics as an original stylist. His subject matter has developed from political and social protest in his early books into bleak descriptions that often show the states of alienation, deception and occasional enlightenment that exist between public and private lives in modern urban America.

Williams has published 15 books of poetry, many of which have won prestigious literary honors and awards, and two that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1987, Williams won a National Book Critics Circle award for his book of poetry "Flesh and Blood." His most recent book of poetry is "Repair."

Among his recent awards are the Harriet Monroe Prize in 1993, the Pen/Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry in 1998 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award in 1999.

In The New York Times Review of Books, Edward Hirsch described Williams's poetry as having a "notational, ethnographic quality" that presents "single extended moments intently observed" and called Williams "simultaneously one of the most documentary and one of the most thoughtful poets working today."