Paul O Williams Books in Order

If you want his signature post-apocalyptic series: The Breaking of Northwall → The Ends of the Circle → The Dome in the Forest
If you want the later Pelbar books with bigger political stakes: The Fall of the Shell → The Song of the Axe → The Sword of Forbearance
If you want far-future space fiction: The Gifts of the Gorboduc Vandal → The Man from Far Cloud
If you want the poetry side first: The Edge of the Woods → Growing in the Rain → These Audacious Maples

Paul O Williams was born in Chatham, New Jersey, in 1935 and grew up there. He spent much of his working life teaching English, but readers usually meet him through two quite different doors: the quiet door of haiku and the wider, stranger door of science fiction.

He studied at Principia College, then earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught at Penn and Duke before joining Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, where he later became professor emeritus. Elsah mattered to his fiction too. The river country around it echoes through the landscape of the Pelbar Cycle.

He started writing haiku in 1964.

That side of his work never really sat off to one side. His first haiku collection, The Edge of the Woods, appeared in 1968, and he kept writing short Japanese forms for decades, later publishing books such as Growing in the Rain and These Audacious Maples. He also wrote essays about haiku in English, and those essays were gathered in The Nick of Time. Readers who like clear thinking about craft still find plenty to chew on there.

Then, in the early 1980s, he made a sharp turn into science fiction and did it without losing his calm, observant style. The Breaking of Northwall opened the seven-book Pelbar Cycle, a post-apocalyptic series set in North America long after a time of fire. The books follow separated cultures slowly finding one another again, and that rebuilding instinct is part of what gives the series its staying power.

He liked big questions, but he usually approached them through people on the move.

Across The Ends of the Circle, The Dome in the Forest, and The Sword of Forbearance, he wrote about exile, travel, language, custom, and the hard work of making peace. Even when the stakes are large, his books tend to stay close to how people live day to day, what they carry, what they fear, and what they hope can still be repaired. That mix of adventure and patience is a big part of his appeal.

He also wrote the two Gorboduc novels, The Gifts of the Gorboduc Vandal and The Man from Far Cloud, which move from ruined America to a far-future interstellar setting. They show another side of him: still interested in culture clash and moral choices, but now on a much larger stage. Whether he was writing about tribes along a river or human societies scattered across space, he kept returning to the same question: how do people live together without crushing one another?

His poetry life was just as active. He helped found Haiku Poets of Northern California in 1989, served as president of the Haiku Society of America in 1999, and was vice president of the Tanka Society of America in 2000. In 1983 he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in science fiction, and in 1989 he received the Museum of Haiku Literature Award. Those honors point to the unusual balance of his career, part novelist, part poet, part teacher.

After retiring from Principia, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and kept writing. He died on June 2, 2009. What remains is a body of work that feels unusually steady: thoughtful post-apocalyptic novels, brief poems that notice the world closely, and essays that show how much he cared about getting words right.