Three Questions for Two of CU Denver’s Award-Winning Poets  

CU Denver’s English Department recently collected some impressive awards. In the fall 2025 semester, Wayne Miller, professor and department chair, and Nicky Beer, professor, were named honorary members of Sigma Tau Delta, an international honor society of writers that also includes influential literary figures like Ursula K. Le Guin, Dave Eggers, Billy Collins, and many others. Earlier this year, Miller also won a Pushcart Prize, one of the most prestigious literary prizes. It’s the second he’s earned for poems from his sixth collection of poetry, The End of Childhood, which was published last year.

In honor of these two poets’ remarkable recent accomplishments, CU Denver News asked them both three questions that are relevant to all of us—whether you consider yourself a writer, avid reader, or neither of the above.

1. Why is poetry important in 2026?

Nicky Beer (NB): We’re all together online but we feel increasingly isolated. Perhaps poetry is the antidote to this spiritual sickness; at its heart, it’s an enduringly analog form of human connection. A poem written a century or two ago by a total stranger can still evoke a strong emotional reaction from a reader from 2026. That’s a miracle. That’s cause for hope. And, it’s resonant proof that we are not as truly alone as we may feel.

Wayne Miller (WM): What I love most about poetry is its intimacy. Poetry feels to me like the author is whispering directly into my ear. That intimacy creates space for shared uncertainty and for the exploration of unresolvable complexity. Such quiet, personal engagement with difficulty and paradox has only become more valuable, I believe, in the linguistic and cultural wrangle of our contemporary moment.

2. I don’t think I’m a poetry person. How can I get started incorporating poetry into my life?

WM: Read a poem every morning! Poems are quick. Allow yourself to enjoy a poem without feeling like you have to understand every little bit of it. Like all arts, poetry is a practice, and you definitely see more in poems the more you read them. But the core pleasure of a poem is in its intimacy, its images, its rhythms of language, its moments of surprise. You don’t have to “get” every little bit of a poem to get it.

Poetry Daily and Verse Daily cull poems from recent books and literary magazines. The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day has a different editor each month soliciting individual poems from a range of poets. The Slowdown podcast presents and discusses a new poem each day. Those are just a few.

NB: You might feel a stronger initial connection if you start to read poetry about a subject that interests you. Consider checking out the Everyman pocket poets series, which has small poetry anthologies on a wide range of subjects, like poems about movies, poems about monsters, poems about horses, poems about jazz, and so much more!

3. What do you wish more people knew about CU Denver’s English Department?

WM: We have an incredible English Department doing brilliant work in so many different areas—from creative writing to medical rhetoric, from multicultural literature to AI and large language models, from “cult movies” and dystopic science fiction to teaching English language learners, from environmental and science writing to podcasting and language theory. Collectively, our faculty have published more than 60 books. We also have an excellent and ever-expanding internship program, and our national literary journal Copper Nickel is one of the most prestigious journals in the country.

NB: Apologies for weaseling out of this, but I couldn’t possibly improve on Wayne’s answer—he hits all the marks!