Billy Collins was the eighteenth poet in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2012. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. The author of eight collections, most recently Horoscopes for the Dead (2011), he has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation's Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry.