Charles Simic, Poet Laureate of the United States, Strafford, NH

Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia in 1938. His childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. Mr. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963. He earned his undergraduate degree from New York University in 1966.

Mr. Simic is the author of 18 books of poetry. He is also an essayist, translator, editor and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught for 34 years. Mr. Smic won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for his book of prose poems The World Doesn't End. In 2005 he won the Griffin Prize for Selected Poems: 1963-2003. Mr. Simic held a MacArthur Fellowship, and has also held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the PEN Translation Prize and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000. In 2007, the same day he was appointed Poet Laureate, Mr. Simic received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.