Featured Reader
Virtual Event on October 8th, 2024–6:00 P.M to 8:00 P.M.
Live stream will be available on our YouTube Channel at the time of the event!
Dan Williams
Dan Williams is the recipient of the Robinson and Una Jeffers Tor House Poetry Prize for 2023 for his poem, Song of the Sangre de Cristos.
Dan moved from San Jose to Calaveras County after graduate school, found work as a ranger and began to put the place on the page. After 15 years he moved to El Portal and began a career with the National Park Service, continuing to journal and write about the natural world and the people the creatures, rivers and forests. His first national publication was two poems in the “Poet’s Corner” feature of The Christian Science Monitor. His first Martian publication was aboard the MAVEN Martian atmosphere explorer where an engraved haiku of his now resides with those of others.
While in graduate school, Dan studied poetry writing with Nils Petersen, met Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, who admitted he’d rather be a poet than a novelist, and participated in a reading at the Berkeley bookstore where Ginsburg had introduced Howl. In 2015 he attended a seminar on Post-Modern Poetry at Stanford led by Irish poet, Eavon Boland, followed by a tour of Ireland in search of all things Joyce and Yeats.
He is a member of Poets & Writers, New York, Chaparral Poets of California, and The Ina Coolbrith Circle, and has poems in many journals and anthologies. Dan has four poetry chapbooks published by Moonstone Press, Philadelphia. He is essentially a California regional poet of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Northern California and has poems sequestered in Yosemite’s time capsule. A member of Mariposa County’s Historical Society, he also has a poem in Lee Herrick’s Our California online anthology.
Dan is currently at work on a longer collection of poetry, A Williams Sampler, which will be out this winter.