This is the personal website of William Hicks: poet, physicist, and software developer. Originally from Kennesaw, GA, he currently lives in Albany, NY. William graduated from Brown University in 2012 with a Bachelor of Science in physics and literary arts. His undergraduate physics thesis was entitled U(1) charges in weakly-coupled free-fermionic heterotic string models, for which he received the Mildred Widgoff Prize for Excellence in Thesis Preparation. His undergraduate literary arts thesis, a collection of poems entitled Dayfall was the departmental nominee for the Brown Distinguished Thesis Prize.
After graduating from Brown, he went on to earn his Master of Science in physics at Brandeis University in 2014, where he worked on high-performance simulations of viral budding through cell membranes. He then returned to Brown University, where he completed a Master of Fine Arts in literary arts in
- His MFA thesis (completed under the direction of Joanna Howard) was a novel-in-verse entitled Jornada del Muerto.
William Hicks is the author of Stargazer’s Kitchen, a collection of poems published by Synecdoche. He is also the lead developer of Writing3D, an open source project to create a simple, user-friendly point of entry for creation of sophisticated virtual reality (VR) content.
William’s programming interests include high-performance computing, game development, natural language processing, and VR applications. His literary interests (which occasionally overlap) include visual poetry, narrative poetry, and digital language arts. For more information about his software development background, check out his resumé. For more information about his literary background, check out his academic CV.
William’s hobbies include long-distance running, boomerangs, and ballroom dance. Keep an eye on this space for posts about programming, literature, and all of these.