Poetry Lectures Creators & Guests

Paul Muldoon is a poet. He has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize.Currently, he is a Professor in the Humanities and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Previously, He was a Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. He has also been president of the Poetry Society (UK) and Poetry Editor at The New Yorker.

Eavan Aisling Boland was a poet, author, and professor. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of women in Irish history.Boland taught at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin. Then she became a tenured Professor of English at Stanford University, where she was also Director of the Creative Writing program.Boland's first book of poetry, "New Territory,” was published in 1967. She published more than 20 books of poetry, as well as books of nonfiction. She edited several collections of poetry. She received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award.Boland died on 27 April 2020.

Ron Padgett is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and translator. He is a member of the New York School.Padgett's first poetry collection, "Great Balls of Fire," was published in 1969. He won a 2009 Shelley Memorial Award. In 2018, he won the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.Padgett has been a teacher and director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. He worked as publications director at the Teachers & Writers Collaborative for 20 years. From 2008 to 2013, he served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet and academic. She is the 2005 recipient of the Daimler Chrysler Award for South African Poetry. She lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa, and Pennsylvania, US, and serves as an assistant professor of Women's Studies and African and African American Studies at Penn State.

William James Collins is also known as Billy Collins. He is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida. He was also considered as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006.

Mary Karr is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.

Philip Levine was a poet. He was best known for his poems about working-class Detroit, and he was Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.Levine taught in the English Department of California State University at Fresno. He served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006.