The gallery is honored to host poet and author Phillip B. Williams, who will read selections from his books, as well as interview Reyah, whose introspective self portraits intersect with Williams area of scholarship. Phillip B. Williams is the author of 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 Collection 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. Williams is currently on tour with his new novel, OURS, published by Penguin/Viking in 2024. “In Ours, Phillip B. Williams creates a fictional town with a complicated, magical history that is as thrilling to explore as the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The mysteries at the heart of this novel are deeply considered, as is the concept of freedom itself. With a poet’s precision of language and a seasoned storyteller’s attention to character, Williams has written a truly one-of-a-kind epic.” —Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House