B. 1964

Poet and editor Greg Williamson grew up in Nashville and studied at Vanderbilt University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars. He has published several collections of poetry, including A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck (2008); Errors in the Script (2001), runner-up for the Poet’s Prize; and The Silent Partner (1995), winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize.

Williamson’s demanding and innovative approach to formal verse—a master of received form, he has also invented several constraints of his own—conveys his wry humor and the wide-ranging scope of his attention. As poet David Yezzi observed in the Yale Review of the poems in A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck, “Williamson's wild inventiveness—formal, linguistical—would be a trap for lesser poets, his masks at times so elaborate and seamless that only a poet of the first order could speak affectingly through them. ... His dazzling poems leap from the lucid to the mordant and back.”

Williamson is also the author of a children’s book for adults, The Hole Story of Kirby the Sneak and Arlo the True (2015), illustrated by Brian Bowes.

The winner of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Whiting Award, and the Nathan Haskell Dole Prize, he has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a John Atherton Fellowship. His work has been included in Best American Poetry.

Williams is associate editor at Waywiser Press. Since 1992 he has taught at Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Baltimore and in the Atlanta area.