National Poet Laureate Arthur Sze will host a free public reading, “Words Bridging Worlds: On Poetry and Translation,” at Queens College, in Flushing, on Dec. 8 at 7 p.m. in the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library, Room 230. The event will also be livestreamed, and a link will be available on the college’s website.
After the reading, Sze will discuss literary translation with Kimiko Hahn, a distinguished professor at Queen’s College who was named New York State Poet Laureate in June, as well as host a reception and book signing.
According to a news release from the college, this event will be the first time poets with national and state distinctions appear together at a City University of New York college.
The national poet’s presentation is hosted by the Queens College School of Arts and sponsored by the Office of Arts and Humanities, English Department, MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation, Writers at Queens and the Library of Congress.
Sze was named the 2025-26 poet laureate by the Library of Congress in September. As a Manhattan native born to Chinese immigrants in 1950, and raised in Queens and Long Island, Sze chose to hold his inaugural laureate event in Queens because of its linguistic diversity.
The college said students speak more than 90 languages on its campus alone. According to the World Economic Forum, residents in Queens represent over 150 countries that speak over 800 languages.
Sze will also lead a student workshop on poetry translation from 12:15 to 1:30 pm before his reading at the college, which offers an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation.
“Translation practice is a vehicle to develop our own poetry; and to write poetry, with its sonnets and sestinas, its haikus and ghazals all carried over into English from other languages, is to awaken to the possibilities — and expand the resources — of our shared language,” Sze said. “Translation builds bridges and makes connections. The more we give, the more everyone has. Great poetry ignites and reignites our shared humanity, and the transient worlds of poetry in translation play a vital role in bringing us together.”
According to the news release, Sze’s appearance builds on the campus’s status as a literary landmark. The college already announced that a portion of the grounds has been identified as the former site of the Jamaica Academy, a one-room schoolhouse where poet Walt Whitman taught in 1839.
Queens College President Frank H. Wu said he expects the event to be deeply rewarding and impactful for the entire campus community, which he noted is highly diverse and possesses faculty of high caliber, including Hahn. “The opportunity to host Arthur Sze at Queens College and welcome his engagement with our students is an extraordinary convergence of ethnicity and creativity,” he stated in the news release.
Sze is the author of 12 poetry collections, including his most recent collection, “Into the Hush,” as well as the prose collection, “The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems,” which were both published this year.
He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award for his poetry collection, “Sight Lines,” which was published in 2019, and he was named a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for his collection “Compass Rose,” published in 2014.
Sze will give his official inaugural reading as the U.S. poet laureate at the Library of Congress on Dec. 11 and lead two poetry translation workshops in his hometown of Santa Fe, NM, in early January.
For a full list of Sze’s poetry collections and honors, read his biography on Poets.org.
