Poetry Reading: Elizabeth Spires and Michael Collier

Join Elizabeth Spires and Michael Collier for the publication of their new collections, A MEMORY OF THE FUTURE (E. Spires) and MY BISHOP AND OTHER POEMS (M. Collier).

In A Memory of the Future, critically acclaimed poet Elizabeth Spires reflects on selfhood and the search for a core identity. Inspired by the tradition of poetic interest in Zen, Spires explores the noisy space of the mind, interrogating the necessary divide between the social persona that navigates the world and the artist’s secret self.

Elizabeth Spires is the author of seven poetry collections, including WORDLING and THE WAVE-MAKER.

My Bishop and Other Poems fuses personal experience with contemporary historical events by weaving together expansive and deeply imagined narratives with poised but edgy shorter lyrics. Whether Collier is writing about an airline disaster, a friendship with a disgraced Catholic bishop,  or a piano in the woods, he does so with the verve and scrupulously observed detail that has made him one of America’s most distinguished poets.

Michael Collier is a poet and translator and a a finalist for the Poets Prize, and The Ledge, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
He is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland and is a former director of the Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.