U.S. Poet Laureate, 2025-2026
2024 Bobbitt Prize Winner
Arthur Sze was born in New York City in 1950.He is the author of 11 poetry collections, most recently “The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems” (2021) which received a 2024 Science + Literature Award from the National Book Foundation. His other collections include “Sight Lines” (2019), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; “Compass Rose” (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; “The Ginkgo Light” (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; “The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998” (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and “Archipelago “(1995), selected for an American Book Award. Sze has also published an expanded collection of Chinese poetry translations, “The Silk Dragon II” (2024).
Sze’s many honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Howard Foundation, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2012–2017) and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives.
Videos with Arthur Sze
Audio Recordings with Arthur Sze
- As part of Poetry of America, Arthur Sze reads and discusses Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
- As part of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project Audio Archives, Arthur Sze and Bill Zavatsky
- As part of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project Audio Archives, Wednesday Reading: Cheryl Fish and Arthur Sze