Williams earned Honours Bachelor of Science, Master of Arts, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Toronto.

[5] From 2014-2015, he was the Canadian Writer-in-Residence with the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Writers Program, and in 2022, he was the Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris.

Williams’s third book, Personals, was shortlisted for the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.

[8] It is a collection of almost love poems where speakers attempt to connect across an increasingly alienating technological landscape.

The collection continues to be one of the decade’s popular books and Canadian students regularly memorize poems for the nation’s largest high school recitation contest.

The book was called “a game changer to the Canadian poetry scene.”[13] Disorientation (2021) is a collection of essays on race.

The judges of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize describe the book as a "formally inventive and searing meditation on race and Blackness.... [Williams's] writing moves, by turn, from tenderness to despair to anger, yet remains clear-eyed and intellectually rigorous throughout.

He is also on the poetry board for Coach House Books and advisor for the William Southam Journalism Fellows Program.

Williams was the 2024 CBC Massey Lecturer, resulting in five radio broadcasts and a companion book, What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversations in Our Time, which were released in November, 2024.