Former United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins will replace another former United States Poet Laureate, Louise Glück, in Butler University’s spring 2018 Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series lineup.

Collins will give a public reading in the Atherton Union, Reilly Room, on Wednesday, April 18, at 7:30 PM.

Admission is free and open to the public without tickets.

Collins, who sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious,” served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 and was the New York State Poet Laureate from 2004­­ to 2006.

He has published 12 collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, 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. His book Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003 – 2013 was a New York Times bestseller as is his most recent book of poetry, The Rain in Portugal.

His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The NewYorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar. His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry.

He has been honored by 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 Hopkins 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 Humor in Poetry.

Glück had to cancel her scheduled appearance due to illness.

Media contact:
Marc Allan MFA ’18
mallan@butler.edu
317-940-9822

(Photo by Bill Hayes)