William “Billy” Collins
(born 22 March 1941) is an American poet. He served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. In his home state, Collins has been recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004. He was recently appointed Claire Berman Artist in Residence at The Roxbury Latin School, in West Roxbury, MA. He is a distinguished professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York.
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BILLY COLLINS TICKETS
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Biography
Collins was born in
New York City to William and Katherine Collins. He attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains and received a B.A. degree from the
College of the Holy Cross in 1963 and received his M.A. and Ph.D in English from the
University of California, Riverside. He was a student of Victorian Scholar and poet
Robert Peters at Riverside.
Collins is a distinguished professor of English at
Lehman College in the Bronx, where he joined the faculty in 1968 and has taught for over thirty years. Additionally, he is a founding Advisory Board member of the
CUNY Institute for Irish-American Studies at Lehman College. He also has taught and served as a visiting writer at
Sarah Lawrence College in
Yonkers, New York. Collins was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2001 and held the title until 2003. Collins served as Poet Laureate for the State of New York from 2004 until 2006.
As U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins read his poem "The Names" at a special joint session of the
United States Congress on September 6, 2002, held to
remember the victims of the 9/11 attacks.
In 1997, he recorded
The Best Cigarette
(ISBN 0-9658873-0-8), a collection of 34 of his poems that would become a bestseller. In 2005, the CD was re-released under a
Creative Commons license, allowing free, non-commercial distribution of the recording. He also recorded two of his poems for the audio versions of
Garrison Keillor's collection
Good Poems
(2002, ISBN 0-670-03126-7). In 2005, he recorded "Billy Collins Live: A Performance at the Peter Norton Symphony Space" in New York City. Collins was introduced by actor
Bill Murray.
Over the years,
Poetry
has awarded him several prizes in recognition of poems they publish. During the 1990s, Collins won five such prizes. The magazine also selected him as "Poet of the Year" in
1994. In 2005 Collins was the first annual recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry, bestowed by the Poetry Foundation (Poetry Magazine). He has received
fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts, the
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1993, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Collins served as judge for the 2005
Brittingham Prize in Poetry. On March 16, 2009 he read some of his works at the McAllister Auditorium in
Tulane University of Louisiana.
Works
- Pokerface
(1977)
- Video Poems
(1980)
- The Apple That Astonished Paris
(1988)
- Questions About Angels
(1991)
- The Art of Drowning
(1995)
- Picnic, Lightning
(1998)
- Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
(2001)
- Nine Horses
(2002)
- The Trouble with Poetry
(2005)
- She Was Just Seventeen
(2006)
- Ballistics
(2008)