Black and white portrait of poet Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He is the author of 11 books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 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. Sze has also published one book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon (2001), selected for the Western States Book Award, and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). 

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, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. He 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. 

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 14 languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Translations

Bibliography

 

POETRY

  • The Willow Wind, Rainbow Zenith Press (Berkeley, CA), 1972, revised edition published as The Willow Wind: Poems and Translations from the Chinese, Tooth of Time Books (Santa Fe, NM), 1981.
  • Two Ravens, Tooth of Time Books (Guadalupita, NM), 1976, revised edition published as Two Ravens: Poems and Translations from the Chinese, 1984.
  • Dazzled, Floating Island Publications (Point Reyes, CA), 1982.
  • River River, Lost Roads Publishers (Providence, RI), 1987.
  • Archipelago, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1995.
  • The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998,Copper Canyon Press, 1998.
  • Quipu, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2005.
  • The Gingko Light, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2009.
  • Compass Rose, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2014.
  • Sight Lines, Copper Canyon Press, 2019.

TRANSLATIONS

  • The Silk Dragon: Translations of Chinese Poetry, Copper Canyon Press, 2001.

Work represented in anthologies, including Articulations: The Body and Illness in Poetry, edited by Jon Mukand, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 1994; Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, edited by Walter Lew, Kaya Production (New York City), 1995; I Feel a Little Jumpy around You, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye and Paul Janeczko, Simon & Schuster (New York City), 1996; and What Book!?: Buddhist Poems from Beats to Hiphop, edited by Gary Gach, Parallax Press (Berkeley, CA), 1998.

OTHER

  • Editor of collections I Am Waiting to Be Free, 1981, and Cuentos III, 1984. Contributor to periodicals, including Conjunctions, River Styx, Asian Pacific American Journal, American Poetry Review, Hanging Loose, and Manoa. Contributing editor, Buttons, 1971-73, and Tyuonyi, 1985-94. Corresponding editor, Manoa, 1998—.