ARTHUR SZE, an award-winning poet, translator, and editor, was named the 25th U.S. Poet Laureate in September 2025. Born in 1950 in New York City to Chinese immigrants, he left home in 1968 to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to pursue a career in the sciences. In 1970, after taking a poetry workshop with Denise Levertov, he transferred to the University of California Berkeley, where he studied poetry, classical Chinese, and started translating classical Chinese poetry. In 1972, he completed his program with Phi Beta Kappa honors.
Moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, Sze began his journey as a poet working in the state’s Poetry-in-the-Schools program from 1973 to 1983. He joined the staff of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in 1984, where he taught linguistics, playwriting, and English composition. In 1989, he became the director of the creative writing program and professor emeritus of IAIA until his retirement in 2006. As director, he expanded the IAIA Associate of Arts degree into a four-year Bachelor of Fine Arts undergraduate degree program.
Sze served as Santa Fe’s first poet laureate from 2006 to 2008. Then, from 2012 to 2017, he held the position of chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was the 2023-2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University.
Sze is the author of twelve books of poetry, including:
- Into the Hush (2025)
- The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2024), awarded the 2024 National Book Foundation Science & Literature Prize
- Sight Lines (2019), received the National Book Award for Poetry
- Compass Rose (2014), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
- The Ginkgo Light (2009), received the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award, and
- The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (1998), received the Balcones Poetry Prize and Asian American Literary Award
Over the years, Sze has received several other awards, fellowships, and grants:
- 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from the Yale University
- 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry
- 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation
- 2021 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America
- 2013 Jackson Poetry Prize awarded by Poets & Writers
- 1998-2000 Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award
- 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship
- 1995 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry
- 1993 & 1982 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships
- 1991 Howard Foundation Fellowship, and
- Five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry in 2012, 1997, 1994, 1983, and 1980.
Sze’s poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. He lives in Santa Fe with his wife and poet Carol Moldaw.
Photo by Shawn Miller / Library of Congress
