Michael Collier
MICHAEL COLLIER has won several award and fellowships for his poetry, a "Discovery"/ The Nation award (1981), the 1988 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of American, a Thomas J. Watson fellowship, a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and an NEA creative writing fellowship. A graduate of Connecticut College (B.A. 1976) and the University of Arizona (M.F.A. 1979), Collier has traveled widely – from London to northern Africa to Siberia and Japan – and worked at various times as a house painter and a community activist. He is an assistant professor of English and associate director of creative writing at the University of Maryland and a visiting professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He was director of the summer writings' conference at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1983-84. His first book, The Clasp and Other Poems, was published by Wesleyan in 1986.