
Billy Collins & Geoff Dyer
Billy Collins & Geoff Dyer join together for an presentation of poetry, readings, and conversation.
Billy Collins’ most recent collection of poems is Water, Water (Random House, 2024). He served as U.S, Poet Laureate and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. An illustrated gathering of his poems about dogs titled Dog Show is forthcoming.
Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar, he is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.” The poems themselves best explain this phenomenon. The typical Collins poem opens on a clear and hospitable note but soon takes an unexpected turn; poems that begin in irony may end in a moment of lyric surprise. No wonder Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” It is a door that many thousands of readers have opened with amazement and delight.
Geoff Dyer’s many books include the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, White Sands, The Last Days of Roger Federer and But Beautiful (described by Keith Jarrett as ‘the only book about jazz I have recommended to my friends’ and by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as ‘one of my favorite books’). Homework, a memoir, will be published by FSG in June. His books have been translated into 24 languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is a Writer in Residence at USC.