Carol Moldaw and Arthur Sze, Poets (July/August 2022)

The Merwin Conservancy welcomed poets Carol Moldaw and Arthur Sze for a residency in Summer 2022.

Carol Moldaw’s eighth book, Go Figure, will be published by Four Way Books in 2024. Her most recent books are Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018), So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems and The Widening, a short novel. She is the author of four other books of poetry, The Lightning Field, which won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize, Through the Window, Chalkmarks on Stone, and Taken from the River. Through the Window was translated into Turkish and published in a bilingual edition in Istanbul as Penceredon/Through the Window; her work also has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Italian. Moldaw is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, and her work is published widely in journals, including AGNI, Antioch Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly, and Yale Review. It has also been anthologized in many venues, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, and Under 35: A New Generation of American Poets. As noted in The New Yorker, Moldaw’s work “repeatedly achieves lyric junctures of shivering beauty.” About The Lightning Field, Frieda Gardner wrote in The Women’s Review of Books: “She courts revelation . . . in a voice variously curious, passionate, surprised, meditative, and sensual. On the surface of her work are rich sound and variation of rhythm and line. A few steps deeper in lie wells of feeling and complexities of thought.” From 2005-2008 Moldaw was on the faculty of Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s low-residency M.F.A. program, and she has been a recurrent Visiting Writer at the Vermont Studio Center, taught at the College of Santa Fe and in the MFA program at Naropa University. In the spring of 2011, she served as the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University; currently she teaches privately in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she lives with her husband.

Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), Sight Lines (2019), for which he received the National Book Award for Poetry; Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award. He has also published one book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon (2001), selected for the Western States Book Award, and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). A recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the eighth annual ‘T’ Space Poetry Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, as well as five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico. From 2012 to 2017, he was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and, in 2017, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry and in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His work has been translated into fourteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.