The Library of Congress has named Arthur Sze the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the United States for 2025-2026. Sze, the 25th poet to serve in the position, succeeds such recent poets laureate as Ada Limón (2022–2025), Joy Harjo (2019–2022), and Tracy K. Smith (2017–2019). He will begin his term with a free public reading on October 9 in the LOC’s Coolidge Auditorium.

As the nation’s official poet, the laureate has a mission “to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry,” according to the LOC. Each poet laureate is appointed by the Librarian of Congress to an initial one-year, renewable term. Other distinguished recipients include Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Juan Felipe Herrera, W.S. Merwin, and Natasha Trethewey.

Acting Librarian of Congress Robert Randolph Newlen said in a statement that the LOC is “thrilled” to honor Sze, a resident of Santa Fe, N.M., and the first-ever Asian American U.S. poet laureate. “His poetry is distinctly American in its focus on the landscapes of the Southwest, where he has lived for many years, as well as in its great formal innovation,” Newlen wrote in the LOC’s announcement. “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.”

Sze, who won a National Book Award in Poetry in 2019 for Sight Lines, has received numerous honors, including the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2024, the LOC awarded Sze the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, a recognition for his lifetime achievement.

“A few months ago, Rob Casper, the head of poetry and literature at the Library of Congress, called me to see if I would serve as the next U.S. poet laureate,” Sze told PW. “I told Rob I needed the evening to think it over, and then I called him the next morning and said I’d be honored.” Sze said his excitement at the opportunity comes with a measure of concern: “I feel a responsibility to do my best to widen and deepen the appreciation and recognition of poetry.”

Poetry in Translation

Because every U.S. poet laureate designs a special focus for their term, Sze plans to explore the art of translation, with the goal of compiling an anthology of translated poems from various languages and time periods. His own translation practice goes back to his undergraduate studies at the University of California–Berkeley, when he spent time translating ancient Chinese poetry.

“At first, I did it just because I thought that translations into English sounded so antiquated or dated, and then I discovered that it was an incredibly deep form of reading,” Sze said. “I found myself writing out each Chinese character, stroke by stroke, to personalize the language. Imagining how that poem got created was intensely exciting for me. I learned my craft of writing poetry through translation.”

Consequently, Sze views translation as a gateway into composition. “Translation is everywhere in our language and culture, and for people who might be a little intimidated by reading poems or the reputation of poetry, translating a poem is a little safer—it’s like working with someone else’s words and language,” he said. “I’ll use translation as a specific lens to appreciate the writing and the appreciation of poetry.”

Sze is an emeritus faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he taught for 22 years, and he pointed the importance of translating from Indigenous American languages. “I probably worked with students from over 200 tribes across the United States,” Sze said. “And with this idea of a translation anthology, I’m tinkering with lots of ideas. A former student of mine, Orlando White, recently invited me to read my poetry on the Navajo reservation and gave me a copy of his book of one-word Navajo poems.” Sze described an example, White’s poem on the concept of “balance,” that “could be another vehicle for experimenting, playing with language, and translating.”

Looking back at the many branches of his own career, Sze said that he intended to draw upon all of them in his work as poet laureate. “I’ve been called an experimental poet, a surrealist, a cubist, an eco-poet, an ecstatic poet,” he said. “I think the labels are all of limited value, and in many ways, I was doing my thing long before there was an eco-poetry movement in the 1990s.”

Describing a passage in his sequence “The String Diamond,” which lists endangered species, Sze reflected on how mushroom foraging in the northern New Mexico mountains has contributed to his written engagement with the natural world. “If I go out and write a poem about mushroom hunting, I’m doing it for the sense of exploration, adventure, and being in nature,” he said. “The poetry for me is that sense of fragility and vulnerability. You look at the species that are disappearing and then you look at our own lives. It’s all interconnected—scientists would say entangled—in ways that you can’t extricate. That to me is very moving as a poet.”

Sze said he looks forward to the coming year and his chance, he said, “to champion poetry. I feel like poetry resists all forms of coercion. Poetry is an expression of freedom. And to use our language with emotion and passion and imagination—that’s what I want to do as poet laureate. I feel like if I can do that, I will have made a contribution.”