Billy Collins is the author of ten collections of poetry, including the recent Ballistics and Sailing Alone Around The Room: Selected Poems; He has also edited several anthologies, including two collections of 180 poems for everyday reading, and, most recently, Bright Wings, an anthology of bird poems. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, and has taught at Lehman College in New York for more than thirty years. His many awards and honors include the Mark Twain Prize, Poetry magazine’s Poet Of The Year, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In addition, he has appeared on the radio program “A Prairie Home Companion.”
Collins read from his work on March 11, 2010, in Cornell’s Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.