Tues 10/27 @ 6:00PM
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

The C.K. Williams Reading Series, named in honor of the late Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet C.K. Williams, who served on Princeton’s Creative Writing faculty for 20 years, showcases seniors in the Program in Creative Writing with established writers as special guests. All readings in the 2026-27 series take place at 6:00 p.m. at Labyrinth Books, located adjacent to campus at 122 Nassau Street in Princeton.

Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories, winner of the Maya Angelou Book Award, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. A Lucky Man: Stories was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, Guernica, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories. He was a Carol Houck Smith Fellow (Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing), a Wallace Stegner Fellow (Stanford University), and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters), the Rome Prize in Literature, and an O. Henry Award. His work has also received support from the Lannan Foundation and Loghaven Artist Residency (Aslan Foundation). Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he divides his time between Iowa City and New York, and he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

This event is co-sponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts and Labyrinth Books.