The poet C. K. Williams has been a professor for English and composition at Princeton University since 1996. When he is not teaching at Princeton, he and his wife live in Paris. Williams was a Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin from September to December 1998.
Professor Williams has received numerous awards for his poetry, most recently the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. In addition, he was winner of the PEN/Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry in 1998 and the National Book Critics Award for Flesh and Blood. His fellowships include one from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation as well as a Woodrow Wilson-Lila Wallace fellowship. Williams' work has appeared in numerous publications, including Akzent, The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, The Berkeley Review, Lettres International and Paris Review.
During his stay at the Hans Arnhold Center, C. K. Williams worked on a series of poems examining the extent to which individual conscience compares to historical conscience, using the example of Germany in its role as an important historical center.