Arthur Sze Just Became America’s New Poet Laureate

Arthur Sze, the son of Chinese immigrants who has been quietly shaping American poetry for half a century, has just been named the 25th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress, as reported by NPR. He is now officially the nation’s poetic voice.

While this latest honor reaffirms his earlier accolades (his book Sight Lines won the 2019 National Book Award, and in 2024 he took home the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize), this new title feels more substantial. As Sze himself put it, it is not just about him. It is recognition for “everyone who works tirelessly on behalf of poetry, including teachers, librarians, and editors.”

Living in the American Southwest, he roots his poems in desert landscapes and then expands outward, pulling in science, philosophy, art, and human longing until you feel like you are standing at the intersection of worlds, as if seeing everything through a panoramic lens. Acting Librarian of Congress Robert Randolph Newlen even compared him to Whitman and Dickinson, saying Sze “forges something new from a range of traditions and influences.”

You see that fusion in one of his most celebrated poems, “Architect’s Watercolor.” It begins with a drawing of people walking into a meeting, but soon spirals into something vast and luminous:

An architect draws a watercolor

depicting two people about to

enter a meeting room, while

someone on the stairway gazes

through windows at a park, river,

skyscrapers beyond; he does not want to be

locked like a carbon atom in a benzene

ring but needs to rotate, lift off, veer

along wharves and shoreline.

Sze is adept at layering ideas and images like these, as a painter does on canvas. Maybe that is why his voice matters right now. In a fractured, fast-moving world, Sze slows us down. His poetry make us notice the threads connecting it all: rivers to cities, atoms to people, the micro to the cosmic. Now as Poet Laureate, he is not just writing poetry. He is teaching us how to see things anew. As an Asian American, his appointment is a moment to celebrate, a reminder that our stories and perspectives are essential threads in the fabric of America's creative arts.

Photo by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress