Poet Michael Collier Shares His Dark Wild Realm, September 12

Chestertown, MD, September 6, 2006 — Washington College's Sophie Kerr Committee presents acclaimed poet Michael Collier reading from his collections, Dark Wild Realm, The Ledge, The Neighbor, The Folded Heart, and The Clasp, Tuesday, September 12, at 4:30 p.m. in the Sophie Kerr Room of the Miller Library. A booksigning will follow. The event is free and open to the public.

Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001-2004, Collier released Dark Wild Realm (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)—his fifth collection of verse—this summer. He is the author of four additional collections includingThe Ledge, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Collier's poetry has been praised for its remarkable lucidity, possessing the rare ability to bring the wonders of the visual world into crisp, dynamic sentences while capturing the extraordinary of the ordinary.

"He has a novelist's gift for engaging the physical and social world we live in," notes Peter Campion, Assistant Professor of English at Washington College. "Yet his poems still deliver an intense, lyrical change."

Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Collier received his M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

The reading is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee, which works to carry on the legacy of the late Sophie Kerr, a writer from Denton, Maryland, whose generosity has done so much to enrich Washington College's literary culture. When she died in 1965, Kerr left the bulk of her estate to the college, specifying that one half of the income from her bequest be awarded every year to the senior showing the most "ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor" and the other half be used to bring visiting writers to campus, to fund scholarships, and to help defray the costs of student publications.