|
In June, Billy Collins ’63, professor of English at Lehman
College at the City University of New York and writer-in-residence
at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, N.Y., was named the
nation’s next poet laureate. Collins will begin his tenure
as
the 11th poet laureate of the United States in October.
“My
first reaction was kind of hyperventilation, I suppose,” Collins said in an interview
with The New York Times. “It came completely out of the blue, like a soft
wrecking ball from outer space.”
Collins lives with his wife, Diane, in Somers, N.Y. He received his Ph.D. in
romantic
poetry from the University of California, Riverside. His books include Picnic,
Lightning (1998); The Art of Drowning (1995); and Questions
About Angels (1991). His poetry has appeared in anthologies, textbooks
and a variety of periodicals including Poetry, The Paris Review and The
New Yorker. Collins’ work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize anthology
and The Best American Poetry anthologies for 1992, 1993 and 1997.
A recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The
National
Endowment
for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, he has received the Bess Hokin
Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize and the Levinson
Prize.
His next collection, Sailing
Alone Around the Room, will be published this fall.
Collins returned to Holy Cross in November 2000 to give
a reading of his work. He succeeds Worcester native Stanley
Kunitz, who assumed the post of
poet laureate
in August 2000.
|
