Since 2005 the William Carlos Williams Society Biennial Conference has brought together writers, literary and cultural historians, and independent scholars to discuss Williams’s writing and its relationships to modern poetry and other literary forms––in North America and in other areas of the world. The 2024 conference, Crossing Borders / Cruzando Fronteras, convened at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Mayagüez February 15–17, 2024.
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Walter Scott Peterson Prize (Volume 39 2022 and Volume 40 2023)
We are pleased to announce the 2022 (volume 39) award for Sam S. Hushagen’s “William Carlos Williams and the Traditions of Georgic,” and the 2023 (volume 40) for Florian Gargaillo’s “Invisible Labor in William Carlos Williams”
Continue readingThe Paterson Project
A Musical and Visual Response to William Carlos Williams’ poem: a composer of modern classical music and a visual artist unite to create the Paterson Project, based on the poetry of William Carlos Williams
Continue readingMLA 2025 (New Orleans): 100 Years of In the American Grain and Williams and Jazz
The William Carlos Williams Society is sponsoring two sessions at the 2025 MLA convention in New Orleans (9–12 January): William Carlos Williams and the Question of ‘America’: 100 Years of In the American Grain” and “William Carlos Williams and Jazz.”
Continue readingALA 2024 (Chicago): Botanical Williams
Williams’s study of and focus on the botanical deeply informed his career in medicine and his literary work; and his poems are rich with imagery of all kinds of plants, especially flowers. We are interested in papers that explore how he used plants of all kinds as inspiration and as a vehicle for his imagination.
Continue readingMSA Brooklyn: “Everything is and is new”: Spring and All at 100
A seminar for participants to consider the many afterlives of Williams’s Spring and All and to engage with both its overt and subtle influences in the work of poets throughout the twentieth century and into the contemporary moment.
Continue readingA Note on the Childhood Home of William Carlos Williams
Recent data collected by Rutherford Borough Historian Rod Leith provides evidence to support Williams’s birthplace as 87 West Passaic Avenue.
Continue readingWilliam Carlos Williams: Crossing Borders / Cruzando Fronteras
The Tenth Biennial Conference of the William Carlos Williams Society
will convene at the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, February 15–17 2024
Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable
From April 6, 2023 – September 17, 2023, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art is hosting the first retrospective of poet and artist Mina Loy (1882–1966).
Continue readingWilliams/Levertov, Levertov/Williams 1923–2023: Confluences
Call for papers on the shared views, poetics, and engagement with history and social reality in the works of Williams and Levertov, as well as their differences and divergences. Abstracts by July 21, 2023
Continue readingSurvey for Approaches to Teaching the Works of William Carlos Williams
Respond to the survey and/or submit a proposal for Approaches to Teaching the Works of William Carlos Williams
Continue readingMLA 2024 (Philadelphia) William Carlos Williams, Paterson, and the Environmental Humanities
Join us in Philadelphia for our 2024 MLA session “William Carlos Williams, Paterson, and the Environmental Humanities”
Continue readingHugh Witemeyer (1939-2022) In Memoriam
Hugh Witemeyer, who died last May, taught at the University of New Mexico for more than 40 years. Born in Flint, Michigan, Hugh was a central figure in Ezra Pound scholarship, having established his reputation with The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal: 1908-1920 (Univ. of California, 1969), based on his Princeton dissertation under A. Walton Litz.
Continue readingJohn T. Lowney (1957–2022) In Memoriam
This past September admired friend and respected scholar, John T. Lowney, passed away at the age of 65. John was professor of English at St John’s University in Queens, New York.
Continue readingA Concordance to the Poems of William Carlos Williams!
The Society is thrilled to announce that our open-access, digital concordance to the poems of William Carlos Williams is live!
Continue readingJoin us in Boston at the 2023 ALA
The William Carlos Williams Society has finalized two panel discussions at the thirty-fourth annual meeting of the American Literature Association Conference in Boston, May 25–28, 2023.
Continue readingALA 2023 (Boston) Lowell and Williams
Beyond the settled and superficial views that result from the repetition of a few well-worn quotes from Lowell about Williams, what can we learn from reading these two writers together now?
Continue readingALA 2023 (Boston) The Great American Novel at 100
How do we understand its mixed composition, its challenge to novelistic chronology, and its shifts of voice from persona to persona? What do we make of the fact that much of it is stolen? Is the dialogue between the urbane interrogator and the one he calls “mon vieux coco” central? What does the text teach us about the canonical idea of a “great American novel”?
Continue readingMLA 2023 (San Francisco)
A celebration and critical assessment at the 100th anniversary of the publication of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All.
Continue readingChallenging Williams: Biennial Meeting of the Society in Chicago
The Biennial Meeting of the William Carlos Williams Society is scheduled for June 23-25th in Chicago
Continue readingALA 2022 (Chicago)
The William Carlos Williams Society will host two panels at the American Literature Association’s 33rd Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, May 26-29, 2022
Continue readingWCW Society Bylaws Update
Founded in 1975, the William Carlos Williams Society has been through myriad growths and changes in its history. In an effort to keep its governing documents up to date with the processes we now use, the Executive Committee of the Society has undertaken to revise the bylaws of the Society.
Continue readingWinners of the Walter Scott Peterson Award
The WCW Society offers an annual prize of $500 for the best work published in the William Carlos Williams Review in a given year.
Continue readingWCW’s lost translation of E.C. Fabre’s short story “Cage”
Scheduled for publication in Translation Review, and now available online, is Jonathan Cohen’s essay presenting Williams’s translation of E.C. Fabre’s short story “Cage,” first published in Blast (1933).
Continue readingIslands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape
In Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape (Viking 2021), a sort of world tour guide to wastelands that have reverted to a sort of wildness, Cal Flyn devotes a chapter to Paterson, NJ, that recalls her visit with the editor of Weird New Jersey to the ruins below the Falls where they encounter a lone inhabitant.
Continue readingMLA 2022 Multilingual Williams
William Carlos Williams—including but not limited to his multilingual home and upbringing, his experiences living in Germany and France, his recognition of the need for knowledge of foreign languages, his readings of poetry and/or prose in translation, and his translations from Spanish, French, Greek, and Chinese.
Continue readingNew Acquisition in the William Carlos Williams Collection at the University of Buffalo Libraries
A collection of the papers of William Carlos Williams has found a new home in the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries at the University of Buffalo.
Continue readingWilliams and the Medical Humanities
A pre-med undergraduate at Oxford College at Emory University, Audrey Ruan, recently discovered an unpublished manuscript by poet and physician William Carlos Williams.
Continue reading2021 American Literature Association
The William Carlos Williams Society will sponsor two panels at the 2021 Annual Conference of the American Literature Association in Boston, Massachusetts. The dates of the conference are July 7–11.
Continue readingWilliams and Medicine
A double issue of the William Carlos Williams Review will be published in Spring 2022 on the topic of “Williams and Medicine,” guest-edited by Theodora Rapp Graham and Richard Ratzan,MD.
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