Arthur Sze
Photo by Shawn Miller / Library of Congress.
Arthur Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He is the author of 12 books of poetry, including Into the Hush (2025), the winner of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement; The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); 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; Quipu (2005); 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, all published by Copper Canyon Press. Sze has also published The Silk Dragon II (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), an expanded edition of his 2001 book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon, which was selected for the Western States Book Award for Translation; a prose collection The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2025); and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press, 2010).
Sze’s poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Harper’s, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry and in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His work has been translated into 15 languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Sze is a recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry.
Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico. From 2012 to 2017, he was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and, in 2017, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
On September 15, 2025, Sze was named 25th U.S. Poet Laureate.