Speaker Bio

Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. 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. His readings are usually standing room only, and his audience—enhanced tremendously by his appearances on National Public Radio—includes people of all backgrounds and age groups. The poems themselves best explain this phenomenon. 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. No wonder Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” It is a door that many thousands of readers have opened with amazement and delight.

Billy Collins has published eleven collections of poetry, including Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003-2013, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems, Nine Horses, The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, Ballistics, Horoscopes for the Dead, and Picnic, Lightning. 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 Every Day, and was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2006. He is also the editor of Bright Wings: Poems about Birds, illustrated by David Sibley and published by Columbia University Press. He has published a children’s book Voyage (2014), and his latest collection is The Rain in Portugal (2016).

Included among the honors Billy 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. Collins was the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry. In April 2013 Collins was awarded the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. He is also the winner of the 2014 Norman Mailer Prize for Poetry.

Collins served as guest host of The Writer’s Almanac for summer 2013 and continues as Poetry Consultant for Smithsonian magazine. This year he also travelled to Russia as a cultural emissary of the State Department.

Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003. He served as New York State Poet Laureate 2004-06. He is Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College, and a former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.