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Mukesh Williams is a professor of Humanities in the Faculty of Letters at Soka University, Japan. He is also a distinguished poet, fiction writer and a political analyst. His poems have appeared in Campus Poetry, Youth Times, Indian Verse, The Journal of Indian Writing in English, Muse India, Udichi, Indian Verse, Impressions, Kavya Bharati, The Istanbul Literary Review, Centrifugal Eye, Autumn Leaves, Forward Press UK, Asahi Haikuist Network, Poetry Plaza, The Blue Fog Journal of Poetry, Foliate Oak, Plankton, The Daily Mainichi, and Best Poem: A Literary Journal. His short stories have been published in The Copperfield Review: A Journal of Historical Fiction. His works have been quoted in reputed journals around the world. Professor Shyamala A. Narayan mentions his book Nakasendo in an article entitled ‘India’ in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Volume 42, Issue 4, 2007.
Formerly of St. Stephen’s College, Professor Williams has a doctorate in Contemporary American Literature from the IIT Delhi and has worked with late professors Leslie A. Fiedler and William Mulder. He did his M. A. in English from Allahabad University and Senior Cambridge from St. Joseph’s Collegiate Allahabad, both bastions of British colonial education. He has taught English, American Studies and South Asia to graduate and undergraduate students both in India and Japan. He has published over sixty research papers, opinion pieces and editorials, 700 poems, 15 short stories, two academic books, and attended dozens of international conferences. He has delivered many public lectures on topics connected with Indian culture, economy and intellectual property rights in India, the UK and Japan. As a freelancer he also reports for the BBC London on matters relating to Japan and India. He is on theeditorial board of Japan Spotlight, an e-journal published by the Japan Economic Foundation. Tokyo. He is also a visiting faculty at Keio University, Japan.
His literary career spans many decades. His early poems and short stories appeared in the early 1980s. His first book of poems, Nakasendo and Other Poems was published in 2006 and his second book Moving Spaces, Changing Places, a collection of 123 poems, came out in 2007. As one literary critic has pointed out his poetry reverberates with the unrealized potential of the universe and captivates the reader with its mellifluous sounds and linguistic prowess. Professor John G. Cawelti of the University of Chicago finds his poems very expressive and moving especially the way he blends Greek allusions with Indian stories to evolve universal human feelings of love and longing. One of the early reviewers of his poems finds echoes of Pound, Eliot, Tagore and Ogiwara Seisensui in his poetry. Williams' evocative lyricism and controlled cynicism makes him a truly postmodern poet who captures and represents the pulse of our times. Mandira Ghosh writing in The Journal of the Poetry Society (India) sees in Nakasendo a unique configuration of Japanese and Indian cultures.
His third co-authored book, Representing India: Politics, Identities, and Literatures, was released by Oxford University Press in January 2008 and since then has been favorably reviewed in Business India, Muse India, The Telegraph, The Hindu, Boloji.com, Amazon Canada and Literary India. He is now working on the history of Indian expatriates in Japan, the oral history of the Indian partition and a collection of poems entitled The Figural Moment.
Williams was selected as the UNESCO Poet 2008, chosen as a Featured Poet August 2008 by The International Library of Poetry 2007, interviewed by Karla Linn Merrifield in Centrifugal Eye, 2007 and Rohit Wanchoo in The Copperfield Review 2009 and reviewed in many newspapers and journals. He is listed in the World Poetry Directory UNESCO 2008, Marquis Who’s Who in the World and the Encyclopedia of Indian Creative Writers in English 2010. He is the international advisor to MELUS India. |
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