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Charles Kenneth Williams was born on November 4, 1936 in Newark, New Jersey. He received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959. His collections of poetry include Lies, The Last Deaths, Collected Poems, and Selected Later Poems. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987 for Flesh and Blood, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Repair in 2000, and the National Book Award for The Singing in 2003.

In addition to writing poetry, he translated plays by Sophocles and poems by Adam Zagajewski and Francis Ponge. His critical essays were collected in Poetry and Consciousness and In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest. He also wrote On Whitman and a memoir entitled Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself. He taught in Princeton University's creative writing program from 1996 until shortly before his death. He died from multiple myeloma on September 20, 2015 at the age of 78.

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