September 26, 2007

Charles Simic

In August 2007, Charles Simic was named Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Simic, whose work is known for its surrealism, dark humor and irony, is the author of 18 books of poetry. His most recent volume, "My Noiseless Entourage," was published in 2005. A new collection, "That Little Something," is set for a February 2008 release.

In 1990, Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for a book of prose poems, "The World Doesn't End." His collection "Walking the Black Cat" was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1996, and in 2005 he won the Griffin Prize for "Selected Poems: 1963-2003." On the same day he was announced as poet laureate, Simic received the Wallace Stevens Award, a $100,000 prize given by the Academy of American Poets for "mastery in the art of poetry."

Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938 and moved to the United States in 1954. He is a retired professor of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught for 34 years. He writes for the New York Review of Books and is poetry editor of the Paris Review.

Transcript: Charles Simic

Charles Simic reads three of his poems in this web exclusive:

 

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