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Arthur Sze Named 25th US Poet Laureate

Andrew Limbong, NPR
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Library of Congress has named Arthur Sze, seen here on July 18, its 2025-26 poet laureate.
The Library of Congress has named Arthur Sze, seen here on July 18, its 2025-26 poet laureate.  (Shawn Miller/Library of Congress)

The Library of Congress has announced Arthur Sze as the 25th U.S. poet laureate. Sze has had a decades-long career as a poet, with his work often drawing inspiration from philosophy, science and nature. He’s also an editor and translator of poetry. Sze will start on Oct. 9, taking over from Ada Limón.

The job of the poet laureate is to promote the reading of poetry, and different laureates choose different fields and avenues. In the announcement, Sze says he intends to focus on promoting translated poetry.

“As laureate I feel a great responsibility to promote the ways poetry, especially poetry in translation, can impact our daily lives,” he wrote in the announcement. “We live in such a fast-paced world: poetry helps us slow down, deepen our attention, connect and live more fully.”

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Sze, born in New York City, is a child of Chinese immigrants. He studied math and science at MIT in 1968. But in a 1998 interview with WHYY’s Fresh Air, he said he found himself “totally bored” in a classroom and found himself writing all the time instead.

So he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley to study poetry. Since then, he’s written 12 poetry collections, including 2025’s Into the Hush.

The UC Berkeley Campus in Berkeley on Aug. 17, 2023. (Martin do Nascimento/KQED)

In 2006, Sze became the poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he’s lived for a long time. In 2015, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. And in 2019, he won the National Book Award for his collection Sight Lines. 

In the announcement, acting Librarian of Congress Robert R. Newlen praised Sze’s poetry as “distinctly American” in how he portrayed the Southwest. “Like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Sze forges something new from a range of traditions and influences — and the result is a poetry that moves freely throughout time and space.”

Copyright © 2025 NPR

Transcript:

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The U.S. has chosen a new poet laureate. His name is Arthur Sze, a longtime poetry writer, editor and translator. Now, the job of a poet laureate is to promote poetry to the public, to get people to read more of it. But as NPR’s Andrew Limbong reports, Sze is planning on doing the job a little differently.

ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Arthur Sze doesn’t just want you to read poetry. He wants you to write some too.

ARTHUR SZE: Writing poems made me look at poems in a much different way.

LIMBONG: Sze says he remembers being a student and trudging through a poem like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime Of The Ancient Mariner” and being told to look for hidden symbols and meanings.

SZE: And so all through high school, I thought of poetry as difficult, traumatic, esoteric, challenging.

LIMBONG: Writing your own poetry gives you a sense of ownership over the language. And Sze says one of the best ways to start writing poetry is translating poetry, which will be the focus during his tenure.

SZE: I see that as a way for people who might think, oh, poetry is difficult or intimidating – that looking at a source text of a famous poem and then an invitation for a reader to try their hand at translating and making their own translation, that this could be a wonderful way to make poetry more accessible.

LIMBONG: It’s funny that you say more accessible because that kind of – you need to know two languages in order to do it. So it sort of, like, sets a bar pretty high.

SZE: Yes and no. I think…

LIMBONG: Sze went on to tell me the story of a poet who didn’t know any Russian translating a Russian poem through conversation with a friend who was fluent. The point being that this process itself was a useful way to approach understanding the poem.

SZE: Obviously one might not expect this is going to be a great translation – right? – or a definitive translation, but I think it enables people to experiment with language, and that’s one of the first steps toward appreciating and deepening our experience of poetry.

LIMBONG: Tellingly, when I asked Sze what poem he thinks everyone should read, he said it was Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” He said there were moments in it that were stunning. It’s a poem about people and travel and the wonder that is our fellow person, whether they’re on their way to work or coming in from another country. The first section ends like this.

(Reading) On the ferry boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose. And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

Andrew Limbong, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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