Poet Miller Williams has died. He was 84-years-old.
Throughout his writing career, Williams published 37 books of poetry and prose. He also devoted more than 30 years to working as a professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He was invited to perform a reading at President Bill Clinton’s second inauguration ceremony.
Here’s more from The New York Times: “Mr. Williams’s poems were written in common and accessible language, beginning with his own everyday experience but leading to something a reader could recognize as universal. The poem he read at the 1997 Clinton inauguration, ‘Of History and Hope,’ reflected on the past and future of the country and asked: ‘But where are we going to be, and why, and who?/ The disenfranchised dead want to know.'”