Hooray for our New U.S. Poet Laureate

It’s official: Arthur Sze is our 25th U.S. Poet Laureate! The news came out today, and we’re thrilled to see great early coverage in the media, including The New York Times, National Public Radio and Publisher’s Weekly—as well as Arthur’s hometown paper, The Santa Fe New Mexican. We also added new resources on Arthur on our website, loc.gov, including an in-depth research guide.

I hope many of you come to hear Arthur give his inaugural reading at the Library on Thursday, October 9th—tickets will go live this Thursday. In the meantime, I want to highlight two special resources. This is not the first honor we bestowed on Arthur: last year he received our Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, for lifetime achievement in poetry. He came to the Library in December to accept the award and give a talk about his life and work, which Conjunctions magazine later printed. You can read it in its entirety online.

We also have some exclusive content for our “Bookmarked” readers: when Arthur came to the Library in mid-July to prepare for the laureateship, he read three of his poems up in his new office, AKA the “Catbird Seat.” Here they are:

• “Sight Lines”
• “Transpirations”
• “Streamers”

We hope you enjoy this preview and encourage you to come check out Arthur, in-person or virtually, as he officially begins his laureateship on October 9th!