Phillip B.
Williams

Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, IL native and currently on tour with his new novel, OURS, published by Penguin/Viking in 2024. He is the author of two collections of poetry: Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and Mutiny, which was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection and the winner of a 2022 American Book Award. Williams is also the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at NYU Creative Writing MFA and Randolph College low-res MFA.

His work, which was published in POETRY, The New Yorker and Boston Review among others, centers around questions of identity, social change and the connection between language and corporeality. During his time in Leipzig Williams will teach two classes at the Institute for American Studies. One will be a Creative Writing Workshop on poetry about loss and grief, the other a literary studies seminar on surrealism, magical realism, and folklore in US literature. 

Phillip B. Williams will be the Picador Guest Professor of Literature at Leipzig University in the summer semester of 2025.