By Robin Caudell Press-Republican
Video game designer will one day be another identifier for Phillip B. Williams, also an award-winning poet and novelist.
As a first-grader in Chicago, the 38-year-old filled two journals with his imaginings, which included games he wanted to play or make.
poking a third collection of poetry. When he’s not teaching at New York University or as founding faculty of the Randolph College Low-res MFA, he’s getting as much rest as possible because he’s tired from the whirlwind of “Ours,” his debut novel, a New York Times Notable Book of 2024.
Williams was this year’s annual SUNY Plattsburgh Black Poetry Day guest.
The Illinois native is the author of two collections of poetry: “Thief in the Interior,” which was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award and “Mutiny,” which was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection and the winner of a 2022 American Book Award.
“The hope was to get the novel out first,” Williams said.
“I had this idea that you do the fiction and you’ll be able to make a little bit of money and that will help you write the poetry that’s not going to make you any money at all. That’s how it was presented to me. Poetry came first. I’d never taken a fiction workshop.”
As an undergrad, Williams wasn’t having a good time in the business school at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
He was taking more English classes than business classes and transferred, with his mother Constance’s blessing, to get a bachelor’s degree in English.
He took two UI poetry workshops, and professor Tyehimba Jess told him about Cave Canem, where he studied in 2008 with Claudia Rankine, Ed Roberson, Carl Phillips, Angela Jackson and Colleen J. McElroy. Williams trusted Phillips’ vision enough to get an MFA from Washington University, where he was a Chancellor’s Graduate fellow.
During a five-year stint at Bread Loaf Writers Conference, he studied with Ellen Bryant Voigt and James Longenbach. As a fellow, he assisted Eavan Boland.
“All these different ways of having access to teachers and instructors for poetry,” he said.
“I always thought I would do fiction first, but poetry took over. I was able to build a living off of that. Get a master’s degree and end up becoming a professor with that master’s degree and teaching poetry classes. So, it just flipped. It was inverted.”
OURS
In Ours, Williams’ protagonist is “an enigmatic woman named Saint, a fearsome conjurer who, in the 1830s, annihilates plantations all over Arkansas to rescue the people enslaved there. She brings those she has freed to a haven of her own creation: a town just north of St. Louis, magically concealed from outsiders, named Ours,” according to his website.
“I think it’s still showing me what it can do,” Williams said. “There was a time every week I was being emailed something that was going on with the novel, be it a review or an interview. It seems it’s the gift that keeps giving on its own course, it’s own trajectory. This is the most I’ve toured in combination with the first two books of poetry. I’ve been someplace every weekend. I’m busy, and the readers are more interactive. So there are folks that want to talk to me about the novel more than with the poems. It’s been a social, face-forward kind of experience.”
A different iteration of Frances was the book’s first hero.
“I couldn’t write it,” Williams said. “There was nothing that Frances wanted. There wasn’t nothing that Frances needed. Saint had wants, needs, desires. She had things that were really complex about her, and so she ends up taking over the story in a way that is in opposition to what Toni Morrison said about Song of Solomon. She said that Pilate kept talking, and she had to ignore Pilate. I let Saint talk and take over.”
For Williams, it was the most fun writing experience he ever had.
“I think it’s because I don’t have formal training in fiction, and so I didn’t think of all the rules or the right way of doing anything,” he said. “I just wanted to tell the story that I wanted to tell. It’s based off of other books that I have read. Some of it was intuition, but a lot of it was also I like reading this book and I like this book be it East of Eden or One Hundred Years of Solitude or Wild Seed. I want to write books that make me feel that way.”
Williams’ poetics toolkit is flush and because of his training, he’s more methodical. Less organic.
“So, there’s two different ways of approaching the craft,” he said. “One, I have a lot of options because I was taught those options and then the other, I had a lot of options because I have read so much that I felt freer to just explore.”
MAGIC EMAILS
Emails changed Williams’ career trajectory.
He received one to teach at NYU.
He received one to teach at Randolph College.
“It’s proof that I’m doing what I should be doing, which is not to say that it’s supposed to be easy when we’re doing the thing because it’s not been easy,” he said. “I’ve just been recognized in ways that let me know that I affect people’s lives with the writing, such that they trust that I can teach or they trust that I can keep producing work that benefits their world, their imagination, their students. That’s what I’ve learned from it is these opportunities come because people want me to continue to manifest in this direction of being a creative.”
Williams is among those featured in “African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song” edited by Kevin Young (2020).
“That was a surprise to have been asked to be in the anthology,” Williams said. “It let me know that there my work was seen as being in conversation with the lineage of Black poets. I don’t like using words in this capacity, like worthy, because there are a lot of folks who should be in there who aren’t in there and that’s for spatial reasons. It was more so at that moment; there was a poem that was thought that was a way that I was seen as being part of this heritage, this lineage. I felt very seen in that moment and taken seriously. A lot of people don’t get the opportunities to be in anything, you know.”
