Arthur Sze


Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, editor, and professor. He is the 25th United States poet laureate consultant in poetry for 2025-2026. Since 1972, he has published twelve collections of poetry. Sze's books include Into the Hush, a finalist for the 2026 PEN / Jean Stein Award and The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems, which received a 2024 National Book Foundation Science and Literature Award. His tenth collection, Sight Lines, won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry, and his ninth collection, Compass Rose, was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other previous books include The Ginkgo Light, selected for the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award in Poetry and a PEN Southwest Book Award; Quipu ; The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and an Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago, selected for an American Book Award.
Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he resides and is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Early life and education

Sze is a second-generation Chinese American, born in New York City in 1950. He was raised in Queens and Garden City on Long Island. Sze graduated from the Lawrenceville School in 1968. Between 1968 and 1970, Sze attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1970, he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue poetry. In 1972, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley, with a self-directed major in poetry.

Career

His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Harper's Magazine,The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, the Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review Online, and have been translated into fifteen languages,including Chinese, Dutch, German, Korean, and Portuguese. He has authored twelve books of poetry, including Into the Hush, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems, Compass Rose. This latter volume was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
He has been included in six Best American Poetry anthologies, four Pushcart Prize anthologies, as well as Articulations: The Body and Illness in Poetry, Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry,, I Feel a Little Jumpy around You, What Book!?: Buddhist Poems from Beats to Hiphop, and American Alphabets.
In 2012, Sze was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
He was the 2023-2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University, a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe and has won five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry.
He became the United States poet laureate in 2025. He is the first Asian American United States poet laureate.

Reception

The poet Jackson Mac Low has said: "The word 'compassion' is much overused, 'clarity' less so, but Arthur Sze is truly a poet of clarity and compassion." Albuquerque Journal reviewer John Tritica commented that Sze "resides somewhere in the intersection of Taoist contemplation, Zen rock gardens and postmodern experimentation." Critic R.W. French notes that Sze's poems "are complex in thought and perception; in language, however, they have the cool clarity of porcelain. The surface is calm, while the depths are resonant. There is about these poems a sense of inevitability, as though they could not possibly be other than what they are. They move precisely through their patterns like a dancer, guided by the discipline that controls and inspires."

Personal life

Sze lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, Carol Moldaw, and their daughter. Sze also has a son from a previous marriage.
Through his father Morgan, Arthur Sze is a grandson of S.C.Thomas Sze, a younger brother of Alfred Sao-ke Sze.

Awards

Poetry

;Collections
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  • The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems
  • The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems
  • Into the Hush
;Translations
  • The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry
;In anthology

  • As editor

  • Chinese Writers on Writing. Ed. Arthur Sze..