Acclaimed poet Arthur Sze to read at Washington University Nov. 10 and 17

Acclaimed poet Arthur Sze, the visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University’s Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, will read from his work at 8 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 10.

In addition, Sze will speak on the craft of poetry at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 17.

Both talks — part of The Writing Program’s fall Reading Series — are free and open to the public and take place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on the university’s Hilltop Campus. Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Brookings and Hoyt drives. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.

Sze is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Additionally, Sze’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Mother Jones, Ploughshares, Kyoto Journal, The Best American Poetry 2004, Bloomsbury Review, Pushcart Prize XXI and Verse and Universe. Translations of his work have been published in Italy, Romania, Turkey and China.

Born in New York City in 1950, Sze graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley and was the 2004-05 Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College. He has also conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, Naropa University, and Vermont Studio Center. He currently serves as director of the Creative Writing Program at the Institute for American Indian Art in Santa Fe, NM, where he has taught for more than a decade.

Sze is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, three Witter Bynner Foundation Poetry Fellowships and two Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Other honors include a Western States Book Award for Translation (2002), a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award (1998-2000), an Asian American Literary Award (1999), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1997) and an American Book Award (1996).