Michael Collier was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1953. He studied with William Meredith as an undergraduate at Connecticut College, and earned his MFA at the University of Arizona. Poet laureate of Maryland from 2001-2004, Collier teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland. His books of poetry include The Clasp and Other Poems (1986), The Folded Heart (1989), The Neighbor (1995), The Ledge (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Dark Wild Realm (2012), An Individual History (2014), and My Bishop and Other Poems (2018). Collier is the editor of two acclaimed anthologies of poetry, The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry (1993) and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (2000), and a translation of Medea (2006). He is also the author of a collection of essays, Make Us Wave Back (2007). He served as the Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Broadsides: “Goat on a Pile of Scrap Lumber”