Susan Firer grew up in Milwaukee, where she continues to live, write, and work; she also serves as the city's poet laureate. She is the author of five books of poetry, including Milwaukee Does Strange Things to People: New & Selected Poems 1979-2007 and The Laugh We Make When We Fall, which won the Backwaters Prize. Billy Collins has said, "To read the poetry of Susan Firer is to enter a unique building constructed by the imagination, like Kubla Khan's pleasure-dome, out of the shimmering material of words." A spectrum of literary influence is evoked throughout "Call Me Pier," in which Firer takes a variety of famous lines from the likes of Whitman, Milton, Dickinson, Williams, and more, and makes them her own by replacing a word in each with "pier." This experimental technique results in a distinctly literary landscape, in which the poet both pays homage and affirms her own place. Firer is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches courses in creative writing and women's studies. This animation was created by Paula Schultz, and Firer reads.