About this Event
Join six acclaimed poets—former students, colleagues, and editors—to celebrate the collected work of the late Stanley Plumly, one of the most celebrated poets of his generation and a master of the lyric poem in its richest, most flexible registers. Readings by David Baker and Michael Collier, co-editors of , along with Jill Bialosky, Kathy Fagan, Maggie Smith, and Ann Townsend
This event is free. One can pre-purchase the book when registering.
Community Partners for this exclusive program are the OHIO POETRY ASSOCIATION and OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH.
The definitive collection of one of the most celebrated poets of his generation and a master of the lyric poem in its richest, most flexible registers.
Stanley Plumly is one of the most emotionally complex, sustaining, and influential American poets of the last fifty years. Born in 1939, Plumly wrote poems that explored the deep interiors of the human heart and mind against a wide backdrop of cultural and historical events. Profoundly personal yet socially astute, his work is both descriptively exact and allusive, engaging nature and art as well as family and friendship.
For the two years before his death in 2019, Plumly worked with David Baker and Michael Collier, this book’s two editors, to prepare for the present volume. This Collected Poems contains nearly three hundred of his poems—including nine new, previously unpublished ones—and stands as a permanent archive of Plumly’s achievement in verse.
As Plumly wished, does not categorize the poems by individual volume but presents a continuum of his lyric accomplishments. This book bears his gifts and his specific blessing, embodying his wish to offer his poems in reverse chronology, tracing back from the present to the very origins of his aesthetic. In every way, it is the book Stanley Plumly wanted to be remembered by.
Collected Poems gathers the full range of Plumly’s talent as it charts the development of his unique and enduring contribution to the American lyric. The volume stands as a tribute to Plumly’s artistic vision and will be welcomed by his many readers now and in the generations to come.
Stanley Plumly (1939–2019) was the author of numerous collections of poetry including In the Outer Dark (1970), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, and Out-of-the-Body Travel (1978), nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other works include Giraffe (1973), Summer Celestial (1983), Boy on the Step (1989), The Marriage in the Trees (1997), and Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000 (2000), Against Sunset (2017), and the posthumous Middle Distance (2020). His collection Old Heart (2009) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He authored four works of prose: Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008), which was named runner-up for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (2014), which received the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime (2018), and Argument and Song: Sources and Silences in Poetry(2003). Plumly was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland as well as Maryland’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2018.
David Baker is coeditor, with Michael Collier, of Collected Poems by Stanley Plumly. His own new book of poems, Transit, is forthcoming in January 2026. For many years he served as Poetry Editor of Kenyon Review and is Emeritus Professor at Denison University in Granville.
Jill Bialosky is a native Ohioan and Vice President and Executive Editor at W.W. Norton, where she has served as Stanley Plumly’s editor for prose and poetry since 2007. She is author of many collections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including the bestsellers Poetry Will Save Your Life and The End is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother.
Michael Collier is coeditor, with David Baker, of Collected Poems by Stanley Plumly. His books include The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems. Longtime director of Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Collier was also Stanley Plumly’s colleague at University of Maryland for many years.
Kathy Fagan’s sixth poetry collection, winner of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize, is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022). A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she is Professor Emerita at The Ohio State University.
Maggie Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of eight books of poetry and prose, including You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, and her latest, Dear Writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Atlantic, and The Best American Poetry.
Ann Townsend is the author of three collections of poetry and the coeditor (with David Baker) of one collection of essays. She is Professor Emerita of English-Creative Writing at Denison University, and hybridizes award-winning daylilies at Bittersweet Farm in Granville, Ohio.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Gramercy Books, 2424 East Main Street, Columbus, United States
USD 0.00 to USD 45.09
