A Paris Tribute to C.K. Williams (1936-2015)

Writers and friends celebrate the Paris life of internationally acclaimed poet C.K. Williams, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award.

Ellen Hinsey was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and has lived in Europe for the last two decades. She holds degrees from Tufts University and the Université de Paris VII. Hinsey is the author of numerous books; her poetry collections include Cities of Memory (Yale Younger Poets Prize), The White Fire of Time and Update on the Descent. She has edited and translated The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova.

Born in Calgary, Alberta in 1953, Nancy Huston lived in New England and New York during adolescence. After coming to Paris for a Junior Year Abroad with Sarah Lawrence College in 1973-74, she decided to settle there and to become a writer. She publishes fiction in both French and English (and nonfiction, only in French) and translates her own books in both directions. Her novels include Black Dance, Infrared, Fault Lines, Slow Emergencies, Dolce Agonia, and The Mark of the Angel.

Jake Lamar is the author of a memoir, six novels, numerous essays, reviews and short stories and, most recently, a play. He is a recipient of the Lyndhurst Prize, a prestigious Centre National du Livre grant (for his novel Posthumous), France's Grand Prix for best foreign thriller, and a Beaumarchais grant. Born and raised in New York City, he has lived in Paris since 1993.

Denis Hirson has written seven books, mostly concerning the memory of South Africa under apartheid, including the novels The Dancing and the Death on Lemon Street. He has  also produced six anthologies of South African writing in English and French, the most recent being In the Heat of Shadows, South African poetry 1996-2013.

In 1981, Odile Hellier, a former translator and language teacher,opened the Village Voice Bookshop in the Saint- Germain-des-Près neighborhood. Hellier provided the Anglophone community with a source for the best newly published English-language books and hosted literary events with many of the major writers of the last three decades.

Jeffrey Greene is the author of four collections of poetry; a book of cross-genre writing; a memoir; and two personalized nature books, with a third forthcoming in 2016.  He is a professor at the American University of Paris, where he coordinates the Creative Writing Program.

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