Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze (born December 1, 1950, New York City, New York, U.S.) is an American poet who was appointed U.S. poet laureate in 2025, making him the 25th person to hold that post since its creation in 1985 and the first Asian American to hold the post. The winner of a 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Sze focuses on nature, science, and philosophy in his work. He is also noted for his translations of Chinese poetry into English, and he intends to focus on poetry in translation during his tenure as poet laureate. He was appointed to a second term in 2026.

Becoming a poet and translator

Sze is one of three sons born to Morgan and Agnes (née Lin) Sze, both Chinese immigrants to the United States. He was raised in New York City, and his first language was Chinese. His parents had high expectations for him and his brothers. Sze’s mother had graduated from the University of Rochester (New York) on a scholarship and later graduated from Columbia Business School. She became an Abstract Expressionist painter. Sze’s father was an engineer who had earned a doctorate in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Sze read poetry in high school but did not plan on becoming a poet. Instead, he was encouraged to become “something safe and professional,” he has said, such as an engineer like his father, a scientist, or a doctor.

In 1968 Sze enrolled at MIT, where he planned to study science and math. Realizing that these subjects bored him (he would scribble poems in his notebook during calculus class), he changed direction during his sophomore year and attended a poetry workshop at MIT taught by Denise Levertov. He transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied under Josephine Miles, took courses in Chinese language and literature, and focused on translating the poetry of the Tang dynasty. In a 2025 interview with the Library of Congress, Sze said, “Translation is how I learned my craft as a poet.…I apprenticed myself by studying ancient Chinese classical poems and writing them out, and thinking about how they were constructed.”

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Teaching career and poet laureate of Santa Fe

After graduating from Berkeley in 1972 with a B.A. in poetry, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1973 he began working as a visiting poet in New Mexico’s poetry-in-the-schools program, for which he traveled to public schools throughout the state and worked with many Native students. After a decade with the program, Sze joined the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe in 1984, first teaching linguistics, composition, and playwriting before becoming director of the college’s creative writing program in 1989. Sze resigned from his role as director in 2005, and the next year he left IAIA as a professor emeritus. In 2006–08 he served as poet laureate of Santa Fe, the first person in the city’s history to hold that position.

Early poetry collections and poetic style

Sze’s first poetry collection, The Willow Wind, was published in 1972. He followed up with Two Ravens (1976), Dazzled (1982), River, River (1987), and Archipelago (1995), which won an American Book Award. In 1998 selected pieces from these collections were included with new poems in The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998; the book won the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award.

Much of Sze’s earlier work was informed by the minimalism of classical Chinese poetry, featuring short lines and stanzas and singular images as their focus. Sze has noted that he began writing during the height of confessional poetry, a style that he found “melodramatic, maybe a bit overwhelming, intense and powerful certainly, but ultimately, also a bit tedious.” In a 2021 interview on the podcast Between the Covers, he compared the treatment of the self in his own work to a memory of a Chinese landscape painting:

Frankly, just growing up as a Chinese American in New York City with the Chinese culture in my background, I see a landscape painting where there are gigantic mountains and these waterfalls, and way in the corner, if you look really carefully, there’s the little path and a tiny microscopic man basically approaching a bridge. There’s a sense of man being very small in the large scale of things. I do think I carry that sense, that Asian sense of a self being small in a landscape.

Translations and editing

In 2001 Sze published The Silk Dragon, a book of Chinese poetry translations that included poems by Li Qingzhao, a rarely translated 12th-century female poet whose work only survives in fragments. In 2025 he explained to PBS NewsHour why the work of Chinese poets from centuries ago interests him. “One of the amazing things about ancient Chinese poetry is how present-tense they are, that you can read a poem by a poet such as Tao Yuanming, who died in 427 Common Era.…That sense of immediacy to me was astonishing as a young poet, that someone who lived at that time period, you can read the poetry and it could be happening today.” In 2010 Sze edited the volume Chinese Writers on Writing, and in 2024 he published another edition of Chinese translations, The Silk Dragon II.

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Later collections and changes in poetic style

His other collections of original poems include Quipu (2005), The Gingko Light (2009), and Compass Rose (2014), which was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His collection Sight Lines (2019) received the National Book Award for poetry and was followed by The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021) and Into the Hush (2025). Sze also collaborated with visual artist Susan York in 2013 on the book The Unfolding Center, in which his writing is interwoven with 11 diptychs composed of 22 graphite drawings by York. The project originated as an exhibition at the Santa Fe Art Institute.

Notably, Sze’s later work changed to become more layered and intricate in structure and embrace paradoxes and emotional complexity compared with the minimalistic style of his earlier work. To some degree, he shifted away from classical Chinese poetry to explore other eras, including modern literature, as well as Japanese poetry and art. For example, a poem from Sight Lines, “Kintsugi,” takes its name from the traditional Japanese technique of repairing broken pottery and ceramics with lacquer and a metal powder made from gold or silver. Remarkably, the poem took 60 drafts to complete. Mirroring the technique and effect of kintsugi, the poem is composed of an experimental arrangement of one-line stanzas:

He slips on ice near a mailbox —

no gemsbok leaps across the road —

a singer tapped an eagle feather on his shoulders —

women washed indigo-dyed yarn in this river, but today gallium and germanium particles are washed downstream —

In 2019 Sze explained to The Brooklyn Rail the point of this process of “adding, deleting, and experimenting” with multiple drafts and the poem’s structure: “I began to feel that a unified narrative (bowl) could be broken apart and that silence could be my gold lacquer.”

Additional honors and personal life

Sze received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982 and 1993) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997) and was awarded the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize among many other honors. In 2012–17 he served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is married to fellow poet Carol Moldaw, with whom he has a daughter. Sze also has a son from his previous marriage to weaver and textile artist Ramona Lynn Sakiestewa.