New U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze is recent recipient of Yale’s Bollingen Prize

Arthur Sze has been named the 25th U.S. Poet Laureate for 2025-26 by the Library of Congress. His term begins with a public reading on Oct. 9. 

The son of Chinese immigrants who left MIT in his sophomore year to pursue writing poetry, Sze is a poet, translator, and editor.  In February, Yale Library announced Sze as the 54th  recipient of the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, in honor of his lifetime achievements. The prize is administered by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 

Sze is the author of 12 books of poetry and the recipient of numerous literary awards, grants, and nominations. The Beinecke Library acquired his papers in 2016 for the Yale Collection of American Literature. View the finding aid for the Arthur Sze papers. 

“Each of Arthur Sze’s poems makes a precise constellation of disparate elements, a balancing of realms—thought, spiritual, physical,” the Bollingen Prize committee wrote when making its award. “Sze is a deeply philosophical word scientist; every increment of livingness has weight: history, experience, and sound. The lines move between the microscopic and the cosmic. The poem is a universe of unexpected juxtapositions—a droplet, a lichen, a bird, to create a fresh world: ‘all situations reside here.’”

The Yale Collection of American Literature includes the papers of several past U.S. Poet Laureates and Library of Congress U.S. Consultants in Poetry (as the post was known from 1937 to 1986): Leonie Adams (U.S. Consultant in Poetry, 1948-1949); Robert Fitzgerald (U.S. Poet Laureate, 1986-1987); Maxine Kumin, (U.S. Consultant in Poetry, 1981-1982); Louise Glück (Special Bicentennial Consultant, 1999-2000, and U.S. Poet Laureate, 2003-2004); Kay Ryan (U.S. Poet Laureate, 2008-2010); Robert Penn Warren ( U.S. Consultant in Poetry, 1944-1945 and U.S. Poet Laureate, 1986-1987); and William Carlos Williams (U.S. Consultant in Poetry, 1952).

Read the Poet Laureate announcement from the Library of Congress.

Read the announcement of the 54th Bollingen Prize. 

—Patricia M. Carey

Photo by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress