Michael Collier

Michael Collier’s has published five collections of poetry, The Clasp and Other Poems (Wesleyan, 1986), The Folded Heart (Wesleyan, 1989), The Neighbor (University of Chicago, 1995), The Ledge (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), and Dark Wild Realm (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and has edited three anthologies, The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of Contemporary American Poetry (Wesleyan, 1993), The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, co-edited with Stanley Plumy (University Press of New England, 1999), and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (University Press of New England, 2000). He is also co-editor, along with Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch, of A William Maxwell Portrait, (Norton, 2004). His translation of Euripides’s Medea (Oxford UP) appeared in 2006 and a collection of essays, Make Us Wave Back (University of Michigan Press) in 2007.  The Ledge was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Mr. Collier has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and a Discovery/The Nation Award. Seminal to his development as a poet were the Thomas J. Watson Travelling Fellowship and a residency fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Since 1995 Mr. Collier has served as the sixth director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he has helped to revitalize one of America’s most valuable literary institutions.

Michel Collier was born in 1953, in Phoenix, Arizona, where he attended grade and high school.  He continued his education at Santa Clara University and the University of London, before receiving a B.A. from Connecticut College. After which, he returned to Arizona for his M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. Collier has taught at George Mason University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Michigan, Middlebury College, Trinity College (Washington, D.C.), and Yale University.  He is a member of the writing faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.   His primary affiliation is with the Department of English, University of Maryland, where he is co-founder of the Creative Writing Program and where he has worked since 1984.  He currently divides his time between Catonsville, Maryland, and Cornwall, Vermont.