U.S. Poet Laureate to Address Holy Cross Graduating Class

WORCESTER, Mass. – Billy Collins, the United States Poet Laureate, will deliver the principal address and receive an honorary degree at the 156th commencement ceremony at the College of the Holy Cross on Friday, May 24.

Holy Cross will graduate 671 men and women during the ceremony, beginning at 10:30 a.m. at Fitton Field. In case of rain, the commencement exercises will be held in the Hart Recreation Center.

Collins, a 1963 graduate of Holy Cross, is a professor of English at Lehman College at the City University of New York and writer-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of several volumes of poetry, including Picnic, Lightning (1998); The Art of Drowning (1995); Questions About Angels (1991) and the recently published Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems.

His poetry has appeared in anthologies, textbooks and a variety of periodicals including Poetry, The Paris Review and The New Yorker. Collins' work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize anthology and The Best American Poetry anthologies for 1992, 1993 and 1997. A recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, he has received the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize and the Levinson Prize.

The following individuals will also receive honorary degrees:

Dennis Budd, retired chief of the Worcester (Mass.) Fire Department; and Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a clinical psychologist and former member of the Human Rights Violations Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

The valedictory address will be delivered by Marianne S. Bellino '02, a visual arts/history double major with an architectural studies concentration. The Washington, D.C., native is in the College Honors Program.