“William Carlos Williams was born the first of two sons of an English father and a Puerto Rican mother of French, Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish ancestry, and he grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey. He was a medical doctor, poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. [. . .] Though his career was initially overshadowed by other poets, he became an inspiration to the Beat generation in the 1950s and 60s. He was known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry.” (The Poetry Foundation)

The Tenth Biennial Conference of the William Carlos Williams Society (“Crossing Borders / Cruzando Fronteras”) will take place at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, from February 15 to 18, 2024. It will include keynote talks by Marta Aponte and Julio Marzán.

Description: The 2024 Biennial Conference in Mayagüez will focus on Williams’s Hispanic heritage, his indebtedness to the traditions of Puerto Rican, Peninsular and Colonial Spanish literatures, as well as issues of borders and translation in the broadest sense––linguistic, geographic, cultural. [. . .]

The conference is free and open to the public and will include participation from local artists and writers, poetry readings in Spanish and English, as well as a post-conference tour of the city of Mayagüez—the birthplace of Williams’s mother, Raquel Héléna Rose Hoheb Williams, and the site of his uncle and namesake Carlos Hoheb’s medical practice.

The Biennial conference will include discussions, readings, and roundtable sessions designed for scholars to present their work, each in one-hour sessions, across two days of presentations. The format is designed to facilitate questions from the audience and fellow presenters and to explore potential resources and avenues for the study of Williams’s life and work.

For inquiries, you may contact the President of the Society, Mark C. Long, at mlong@keene.edu.

For more information, see https://williamssociety.org/biennialconference/events/

[Photo above by Lisa Larsen/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.]