Billy Collins
Born: 22 March 1941, New York, USA
Nationality: American

Collins is a poet and was appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. A Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York until he retired in 2016 Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library in 1992 and was chosen as the New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. He is currently a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook University, New York.

Collins was born in Manhattan and grew up in Queens and White Plains. An only child, his mother gave up her career in nursing to raise him, and she had the ability to recite verses on almost any subject cultivating the love of words, written, and spoken, in her young son.

A student of Archbishop Stepinac High School, White Plains, New York, Collins went on to graduate with a BA in English from the College of the Holy Cross in 1963. He later received his MA and Ph.D. in Romantic Poetry from the University of California, Riverside. Whilst at Riverside his professors included Robert Peters, a Victorian scholar, and poet. Collins also became influenced by his contemporary poets such as Karl Shapiro and Reed Whittemore. Collins founded the Mid-Atlantic Review with his friends Walter Blanco and Steve Bailey in 1975

A Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, Collins is a founding member of the Advisory Board of the CUNY Institute for Irish-American Studies. He taught and served as a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville and taught workshops across the US and in Ireland. Collins was the US Poet Laureate from 2001to 2003 and Poet Laureate for the State of New York from 2004 to 2006

As US Poet Laureate was asked by the Librarian of Congress to write a poem to remember the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Collins read his poem “The Names” at a joint session of the United States Congress on 6 September 2002. Also as Poet Laureate Collins instituted the program Poetry 180 for high schools and chose 180 poems, one for each day of the academic year, for the program and the accompanying book “Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry”. The program is available online

Collins recorded “The Best Cigarette” in 1997, 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. When Collins moved to Random House je received a six-figure advance for a three-book deal – a sum unheard of in poetry.

Collins has been awarded several prizes by the US magazine “Poetry” over the years in recognition of the poems they publish. The magazine also selected him as “Poet of the Year” in 1994. In 2005 Collins was the first recipient of the annual Mark Twain Prize for Humour in Poetry.

Collins’ work “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July” has been added to the preserved works of the United States Native American literary registry as a culturally significant poem. It is included in the national Advance Placement exams for high school students. Collins is on the editorial board of the Alaska Quarterly Review, and recently contributed to the 30th-anniversary edition. He is also on the advisory boards of other journals, including the Southern Review

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Collins appeared daily on Facebook Live to a worldwide audience reading poems and talking about poetry.

Introduction To Poetry by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means