Arthur Sze, Ilya Kaminsky, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Paul Muldoon: Transient Worlds — An Evening of Poetry in Translation

Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor, and in 2025 he was named the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Into the Hush (2025) and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (2025); The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), for which he won the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014); The Ginkgo Light (2009); Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998); and Archipelago (1995). He also authored Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2026), The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024), and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Sze received the 2025 Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry, the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2023–2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. Professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odesa, Ukraine, in 1977 and came to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum. He is the author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa, and has co-edited and co-translated numerous books, including The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, In the Hour of War: Poems from Ukraine, and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. His many honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, Guggenheim and Lannan Fellowships, the Whiting Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award. His work has been a finalist for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Deaf Republic was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by numerous publications, including The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement. His collaboration with photographer Yelena Yemchuk, Odesa, was named one of Time magazine’s 20 Best Photo Books of 2022. His poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages, and in 2019, the BBC named him one of twelve artists who changed the world. He currently teaches at Princeton University and lives in New Jersey.

Memoirist, critic, translator, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of ten books, including the international bestsellers The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, an NPR and Kirkus Best Book of the Year. His more recent works include Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (2020) and a major new translation of Homer’s The Odyssey (2025). His other honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers. In 2022, he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.