Michael Collier

Michael Collier is the author of five books of poems: The Clasp and Other Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1986); The Folded Heart(Wesleyan University Press, 1989); The Neighbor (University of Chicago Press, 1994); The Ledge (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and most recently, Dark Wild Realm(Houghton Mifflin, 2006). He is also co-editor, along with Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch, of A William Maxwell Portrait (W.W. Norton, 2004). His translation of Euripides’s Medea (Oxford University Press) appeared in 2006 and a collection of essays,Make Us Wave Back, in 2007. Collier has received Guggenheim and Thomas Watson fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Pushcart Prize, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001–2004, he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.