Join poet Phillip B. Williams and Poets & Writers Magazine contributing editor Destiny O. Birdsong for a reading and discussion of Williams’s new poetry collection, Lift Every Voice. This free virtual event will take place on Monday, July 13, at 7 PM EDT. Register now!
In “To Grieve, to Mourn, to Sing, to Feel,” Destiny O. Birdsong’s profile of the poet in the July/August 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, Williams discusses the range of emotions that fuel the poems in Lift Every Voice, especially the devastating effects of avoiding grief, which he attempted to do for more than two decades, starting in high school when he lost his father, who struggled with addiction. “It took that long to express my sadness over his having died, but then also to give him—I guess grace is the word. [And] to give his story back to him, as opposed to the story I held in my mind about him. And it doesn’t mean my experiences of him were not valid. My experiences were real, but they were only my half of the story. So maybe in some ways, Lift Every Voice is my last effort to grieve his life in a way that I wasn’t able to when I was younger.”
In this virtual event, Williams will read from Lift Every Voice and talk about “the necessary work of mourning,” as Birdsong calls it. As she writes in the profile, “Williams is the consummate conversationalist: funny, irreverent, and quick to flash his megawatt smile.... He is also an astute observer of human suffering who is not shy about his own struggles with processing many of the emotions explored in the pages of his new book, including rage, loss, regret, and, yes, grief.”
Register now for the virtual event on July 13!
Phillip B. Williams is the author of the novel Ours and 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 and the winner of a 2022 American Book Award. Williams is also the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. Raised in Chicago, he currently teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at New York University and is founding faculty of the Randolph College Low-res MFA.
Destiny O. Birdsong is a writer whose work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, Poets & Writers Magazine, African American Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She has received support from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Pink Door, MacDowell, The Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published by Tin House Books in 2020. Her debut novel, Nobody’s Magic, was published by Grand Central in 2022, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, was a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and won the 2022 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. She earned her BA in English and history from Fisk University, and her MFA in poetry and PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. In 2022, she was selected as the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Rutgers University-Newark and served as a 2022–24 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She is a contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine.
Photo credits: Profile spread and Williams, Johnny Vo - Black Frame Photos; Birdsong, Tony Gonzalez