Where: Bovard Auditorium

When: Monday, February 28, 2011 : 7:00pm

Admission is free.

Reception and book signing to follow.

Billy Collins, U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. Collins will present a reading of his work followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Billy Collins’ work has appeared in a variety of periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The American Scholar. He has published nine collections of poetry: Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Picnic, Lightning, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry and Ballistics. His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry. He has also edited two anthologies of contemporary poetry: Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. His numerous honors include 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. Collins was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry. He was appointed United States poet laureate from 2001 to 2003 and was named New York poet laureate from 2004 to 2006. Billy Collins is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York.

Organized by the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.