Poetry Reading with Billy Collins
Date: Saturday, September 26, 2026
Time: 6:00PM
Location: Francine Kelly Gallery
Presented in partnership with PathwaysARTS.
​Registration opens Wednesday, July 1st.

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​Billy will also be teaching a one day poetry workshop on Friday, September 25th. ​

Please join us on Saturday, September 26th to hear U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins read from his work in the Francine Kelly Gallery. Dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself. Presented in partnership with PathwaysARTS.

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.