Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams (November 4, 1936 – September 20, 2015) was an American poet, critic and translator.

Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987.

[3] The Singing won the 2003 National Book Award[4] and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005.

[3] The 2012 film The Color of Time relates aspects of Williams' life using his poetry.

I'd always been a little shy but now something, maybe my uncertainty about my identity as a poet, my sense of being a pretender, made me all but mute with strangers: I used to stay all day in my hotel room, reading, trying to write, then I'd go out to eat by myself, and take endless, anguished walks.

His circle of friends included artists, carpenters, poets, a sociologist, photographers, musicians and film makers.

In 1963 he married Sarah Dean Jones, a printer who worked for Eugene Feldman at the Falcon Press in Philadelphia.

Their daughter, Jessie Williams Burns, founded Tursulowe Press in Philadelphia.

They married in 1975 and had a son, Jed Williams, a painter and the owner of an art gallery in Philadelphia.

I began to write poetry again, with more conviction than ever, and more confidence, more of a sense of what I wanted to do (…) The scope of the poems, the certainty they gave me that I could deal thoroughly with themes that interested me, were enough to keep me going.

Like Yeats and Lowell before him, he writes from the borderland between private and public life…(His poems) join skeptical intelligence and emotional sincerity, to make sense of the world and ourselves.