Charles Simic

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and in 1966 he earned his BA from New York University while working during the day to cover the cost of tuition. Since 1967, he has published forty books of his own poetry, seven books of essays, a memoir, and numerous of books of translations of Serbian, Croatian. and Slovenian poetry for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship and the Wallace Stevens Award. His New and Selected Poems (1962-2012) was published in 2013 and The Lunatic in 2015. Simic was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and in 2007 he was chosen as Poet Laureate of the United States. He is Professor Emeritus of the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973.