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Billy Collins
July 7, 2008
Billy Collins was appointed
United States Poet Laureate (2001 - 2003) and was named New York
State Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. No poet since Robert
Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such
broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals
including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American
Scholar. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a New York Public Library
"Literary Lion." His last three collections of poems
have broken sales records for poetry.
Billy Collins has published
eight collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels;
The Art of Drowning; Picnic; Lightning; Taking Off Emily Dickinson's
Clothes; Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems;
Nine Horses, and The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems. A collection
of his haiku, titled She Was Just Seventeen, was published by
Modern Haiku Press in fall 2006. He also edited two anthologies
of contemporary poetry: Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry
and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Everyday, and was the guest
editor of The Best American Poetry 2006.
Included among the honors Mr.
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 Award for humorous poetry.
Mr. Collins is a professor of
English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. |
