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Authors in the Fall

Billy Collins

Sunday, Oct. 18

2 p.m. at

AHS Auditorium

Tickets: $10

Poet Billy Collins, who served as the United States poet laureate for two terms, is coming to Alpena High School this Sunday.

Collins will do a reading of his work at 2 p.m. as part of Alpena County Library's Authors in the Fall series. His poetry has been featured in many anthologies, textbooks and periodicals. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including "Ballistics" (2008), "She Was Just Seventeen" (2006) and "The Trouble with Poetry" (2005).

Collins also is widely known for the readability of his work. He is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, where he joined the faculty in 1968 and taught for more than 30 years.

Additionally, he is a founding advisory board member of the Institute for Irish-American Studies at Lehman College. He also has taught and served as a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College as well as teaching workshops across the U.S. and in Ireland.

Collins was named U.S. poet laureate in 2001 and held the title until 2003. He served as poet laureate for the state of New York from 2004 until 2006.

As U.S. poet laureate, Collins read his poem, "The Names," at a special joint session of the U.S. Congress on Sept. 6, 2002, held to remember the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

He also instituted the program, "Poetry 180" for high schools, choosing 180 poems for the program and the accompanying book, "Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry" one poem for each day of the school year.

Collins edited a second anthology, "180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day" to refresh the supply of available poems. The program is online, and poems are available there for no charge.

Collins has been called "the most popular poet in America" by the New York Times. When he moved from the University of Pittsburgh Press to Random House, the advance he received shocked the poetry world a six-figure sum for a three-book deal, virtually unheard of in poetry.

Over the years, Poetry Magazine has awarded Collins several prizes in recognition of poems they publish. During the 1990s, Collins won five such prizes. The magazine also selected him "Poet of the Year" in 1994. In 2005, he was the first annual recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry, bestowed by the Poetry Foundation (Poetry Magazine).

Collins has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Tickets for Sunday's event are $10 and available at Alpena County Library. Everyone is welcome to attend a reception for Collins to be held at the library following his reading.