“The fact that [Simic] spent his first eleven years surviving World War II as a resident of Eastern Europe makes him a going-away-from-home writer in an especially profound way… He is one of the wisest poets of his generation, and one of the best.” — Peter Stitt, Georgia Review correspondent

Biography:

Charles Simic is widely recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets today. Simic taught English and creative writing for over 30 years at the University of New Hampshire and was formerly co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, but emigrated to the US as a teenager with his family. Despite his background, Simic writes in English, drawing upon his own experiences of a war-torn Belgrade to compose poems about the physical and spiritual poverty of modern life. Though Simic’s popularity and profile may have increased dramatically over the past two decades, his work has always enjoyed critical praise. After emigrating to the US, Simic attended high school in Chicago and went on to study at the University of Chicago. He was drafted into the armed service, however, in 1961, and served in West Germany and France before he would return to continue his education at NYU. Simic earned his bachelor’s degree from NYU in 1966, and his first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published in the following year.

Link to audio of Reading: https://shu.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_84f751f3-d348-41bf-8432-e1ef93f6c25c/

Link to Gallery of Programs: https://shu.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_0aaf6191-740d-4192-9e7b-b7409cf69d6d/?view=gallery

Pictured: Charles Simic. Born Dušan Simić, 9 May 1938 (age 82), Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

List of Notable Works:

• What the Grass Says (1967)
• Classic Ballroom Dances (Braziller, 1980)
• Selected Poems: 1963-1983 (Braziller, 1985)
• The World Doesn’t End (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989)
• Hotel Insomnia (1992)
• Walking the Black Cat (1996)
• Jackstraws (1999)
• Night Picnic: Poems (2001)
• My Noiseless Entourage (2005)
• That Little Something: Poems (2008)

List of Notable Awards:

• 1986 finalist of Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for Selected Poems, 1963-1983)
• 1987 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for Unending Blues)
• 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
• 2007 Wallace Stevens Award
• 2007 appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress
• 2014 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award