Acclaimed poet C.K. Williams will read from his work at 4 p.m. Monday, March 15, in Room 205, Olson Hall. The author of more than 13 volumes, including "Tar," "A Dream of the Mind," and "The Vigil," Williams has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Prize, and most recently, the Pen Voelker Career Achievement Award. Born in New Jersey, C.K. Williams is a professor of English at Princeton University, who also makes his home in Paris for part of each year. His poems examine both extreme situations and the everyday in order to address, in a manner at once ambivalent and probing, the metaphysical and even spiritual questions of our lives. Michael Donaghy, in the journal Poetry Review, called Williams "American poetry's most ambitious and original talent since mid-century." Edward Hirsch, in The New Republic, has described Williams as "a poet of psychological extremes," noting that "no other contemporary poet has given us a more textured or pressurized rendering of what it feels like to think -- to try to think -- through a situational or mental problem moment by moment: to bring the unconscious into the available light of language, to anatomize the psyche with a continual tally of internal and external evidence." Williams' reading is sponsored by the UC Davis English department and hosted by UC Davis professor and poet Sandra Gilbert.