Awards and Honors, Faculty News

Williams Named Finalist for Lambda Literary Award

Visiting literature faculty member Phillip Williams’ debut poetry collection, Thief in the Interior, has been named a 2017 Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

Williams Named Finalist for Lambda Literary Award

The annual Awards, now in their 29th year, recognize LGBTQ literature in the categories of Lesbian, Gay, and Transgender Poetry. This year’s finalists were chosen from nearly 900 submissions and more than 300 publishers. The winners will be announced at a gala ceremony on Monday, June 12, in New York City.

Said one critic in the Boston Review, "To experience Williams’ poetry is to encounter a lucid, unmitigated humanity, a voice for whom language is inadequate, yet necessarily grasped, shaped, and consumed. His devout and excruciating attention to the line and its indispensable music fuses his implacable understanding of words with their own shadows.”

Williams, who’s also currently a finalist for a 2017 Publishing Triangle Award, was recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for Poetry, and was nominated for the 2017 NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. Last year, he was a INDIES Book of the Year Award finalist.