Constant Laval Williams earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California, where he received the Beau J. Boudreaux Poetry Award. He currently serves as a senior reader at Ploughshares. He was a finalist for the 2025 Rhino Founders’ Prize, as well as the 2025 Ninth Letter Literary Award. He was a semifinalist for the Poetry Foundation’s 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and The Adroit Journal’s 2024 Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program. His poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, Lana Turner, The Florida Review, DIAGRAM, and many other publications. Though he is first and foremost a poet, he also has a successful career in music, touring and releasing post-punk and darkwave songs under the name Casket Cassette. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Books by Constant Laval Williams
Selected by Patricia Smith for the Jake Adam York Prize, an unflinching, profoundly gorgeous debut collection about beauty, pain, and the resilience of the human spirit.