December 10, 1910 [Alexandrowsk, Russia] – June 5, 1985 [Los Angeles, California]
Pillin was born in Zaporizhia (then called Alexandrovsk) Ukraine to Elconon and Anna Pillin; the family emigrated to Chicago when William was 14. In 1928, he married Polia Sunockin (born in Poland in 1909), an artist and potter. During the Depression, Pillin worked for the WPA Writers Project, work that brought him all across the United States. The Pillins settled in Iowa and then New Mexico. Pillin was published in the “Federal Poets Number” of Poetry Magazine in 1938. The Pillins moved back to Chicago after the birth of their son in 1940, then moving to Los Angeles in 1948 in order to find more room for Polia’s burgeoning pottery business. Pillin’s first book of poems, Theory of Silence, appeared in 1949. To the End of Time: Poems New & Selected was published in Los Angeles by Papa Bach Editions in 1980.
