SBGradMag Stony Brook's Graduate Student Magazine

Billy Collins, author of eight collections of poetry, Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College, United States Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, founder of the Poetry 180 program, and recipient of numerous other awards grants including the Oscar Blumenthal Prize and the Frederick Bock Prize, recently visited Stony Brook University for the First Year Reading Program.  This program, which selects a text that all incoming undergraduate freshman are to read, intends to create a discursive community founded on the chosen text and various interdisciplinary activities surrounding it.  This year, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems by Collins became that text—and on the date of his campus visit I was fortunate enough to land an interview with one of my favorite poets.  Below is the transcript of that interview; concluding the interview are links to various websites about the author and his work.