CHAUTAUQUA INSTITUTION

Billy Collins @ CHQ 7/30/10, Amphitheater, 10:45 a.m. Former United States poet laureate Billy Collins has published eight collections of poetry, the last three of which—Nine Horses, The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems and, most recently, Ballistics—have broken sales records for poetry. The typical Collins poem opens on a clear and hospitable note but soon takes an unexpected turn; poems that begin in irony may end in a moment of lyric surprise. Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” His appearance with Roger Rosenblatt on the 2008 lecture platform opened one of Chautauqua’s most popular weeks ever.

A New York Public Library “Literary Lion,” Collins’ work has appeared in a variety of periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The American Scholar. He has also published a collection of haiku, titled She Was Just Seventeen, and edited two anthologies of contemporary poetry, Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. Collins was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2006, and edited Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds, with paintings by David Allen Sibley.

Included among the many honors Collins has received are fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also been awarded the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize and the Levinson Prize — all awarded by Poetry magazine. In October 2004, Collins was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry.

Collins was appointed United States poet laureate in 2001 and served in that capacity until 2003. He served as New York’s poet laureate from 2004 to 2006. Currently, Collins is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, as well as a senior distinguished fellow of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College.