News

September 26, 2017

Award-winning Poet Vincent Toro Reads with Four Seniors in Princeton’s Creative Writing Program

The C.K. Williams Reading Series is organized by Princeton students in collaboration with Labyrinth Books

Poet Vincent Toro and four seniors in the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University will read from their work at 6 p.m. on Friday, September 29 at Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street. The reading is part of the C. K. Williams Reading Series, named in honor of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet who served on Princeton’s creative writing faculty for 20 years.

The series showcases senior thesis students of the Program in Creative Writing alongside established writers as special guests. Featuring student writers Edric Huang, Sang Lee, Fiona Bell and Sarah Reeves, the event is free and open to the public.

vincent toro headshot

Poet Vincent Toro opens the 2017-18 C.K. Williams Reading Series. Photo by David Flores

Vincent Toro is the author of Stereo.Island.Mosaic., which was awarded Ahsahta Press’s Sawtooth Poetry Prize and The Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He has an M.F.A. in poetry from Rutgers University and is contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal. Toro is the recipient of a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, The Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, and the Metlife Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award. His poems have been published in the Buenos Aires Review, Codex, Rattle, Cortland Review, Vinyl, Hawai’i Review, Washington Square Review, Paterson Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2015. Toro teaches at Bronx Community College, is a writing liaison at The Cooper Union’s Saturday Program, and is a poet in schools for The Dreamyard Project and the Dodge Poetry Foundation.

The four seniors, who are pursuing a certificate in creative writing in addition to their major areas of study, will read from their senior thesis projects. Each is currently working on a novel, a screenplay, translations, or a collection of poems or short stories as a part of a creative thesis for the certificate. Thesis students in the Program in Creative Writing work closely with a member of the faculty, which includes Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Paul Muldoon, Kirstin Valdez Quade, James Richardson, Tracy K. Smith, Susan Wheeler, and a number of distinguished lecturers.

The Program in Creative Writing also presents the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series on Wednesdays on the Princeton campus. Upcoming guests include Rachel Cusk, Nathaniel Mackey, Hilton Als, Hoa Nguyen, Alaa Al Aswany, Linda Gregerson, Osama Alomar, Luc Sante, Jane Hirshfield, and Walter Mosley.

Press Contact

Steve Runk
Director of Communications
609-258-5262
srunk@princeton.edu