Transient Worlds with Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2025–2026, delves into his signature project, as well as his personal guide to poetry in translation, in this unique anthology that showcases a profound goal of global literary citizenship: to open works up to all readers and to encourage poetic creativity at the fundamental level of language itself.

Purchase your book from Eagle Eye and a portion of your purchase will benefit the Decatur Book Festival.

Signing information: Signing time: 12:45 PM

Signing location: First Baptist Church - Front Lawn

About the Author

Arthur Sze is the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of 12 books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems, selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize; Sight Lines, for which he received the National Book Award; Compass Rose, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light, selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu; The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998, selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago, selected for an American Book Award. He has also published The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry and edited Chinese Writers on Writing. In 2025, he published The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems with the Museum of New Mexico Press. His new book is Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry, a personal guide to global poetry in translation. 

A recipient of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and a Howard Foundation Fellowship, as well as five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2023–24 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. His poetry has been translated into 15 languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

About the Moderator

Clay Smith is the once and future literary director of the San Antonio Book Festival. As the literary director of the Library of Congress, he directed the office of Literary Initiatives, which curates the National Book Festival and oversees the Library’s literary ambassadorships such as the United States Poet Laureate and the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, among others. He is the former editor-in-chief of Kirkus Reviews and the literary director of the Texas Book Festival.