C.K. Williams became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. He had a wide circle of friends in the U.S. and in Europe, many of them artists and writers. He gave a last reading and interview at Drew University in June 2015. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in the summer of 2013. He died at home in Hopewell, New Jersey on September 20, 2015. Twenty days earlier, he had finished working on the manuscript of his last book of poems, "Falling Ill".