Arthur Sze, winner of the 2024 Rebekah Bobbitt Johnson National Prize for Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, in which he will braid some of his poems with details about his evolution as a poet, insights about his creative process and ideas of exploration and freedom in context of the American experience. Following the talk Sze will participate in a conversation with Rob Casper, head of Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress, and receive the prize.
Arthur Sze 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.