Miller Williams, born in the Arkansas
hills, is the author of 30 books of poetry, criticism and history and
was the inaugural poet for the second inauguration of William Jefferson
Clinton. His stories, translations, poems and critical essays have appeared
in most of the seminal journals in English, and his poems have been
translated into several languages. His work has been recognized by the
Henry Bellaman Poetry Prize, the Amy Lowell Award in Poetry from Harvard
University, the New York Arts Fund Award for Significant Contribution
to American Letters, the Prix de Rome for Literature and the Academy
Award for Literature, both from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He holds honorary doctorates from Lander College and Hendrix College,
received the Poets’ Prize, the Charity Randall Citation for Contribution
to Poetry as a Spoken Art from the International Poetry Forum, and the
John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence. In 1999 the multinational
editorial board of Voices International named him one of the best 20
poets in the world now writing in English, and he was selected by a
board of teachers, librarians and writers as one of the 500 most important
poets of all languages in the 20th century. Among his many books are Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms, Points of
Departure, The Ways We Touch, and Some Jazz a While:
Collected Poems (all from the University of Illinois Press). In
2002 the University of Georgia Press published The Lives of Kelvin
Fletcher: Stories Mostly Short. Poems of Miller Williams is available on cassette from Spoken Arts, and the University of Missouri
Press has published a collection of essays by 13 scholars and poets,
edited by Michael Burns, under the title Miller Willliams and the
Poetry of the Particular.
[extracted from 2005 brochure]
