Pulitzer Prize Winner Charles Simic declared Special Guest Poet for the 13th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival

Susan Williamson, Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, announced that Charles Simic, former United States Poet Laureate (2007-2008) and 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner, will serve as Special Guest Poet at the 13th annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival, which will be held next January 16-21 at Old School Square in Delray Beach.

"The work of Charles Simic has had a profound effect on me as a working poet, and I could not be more excited to welcome him to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival," says Williamson. "The first time I heard him at a reading, he was already a Pulitzer Prize winner and a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, and it was a key event in my rediscovery of poetry as an adult. I hope Simic's appearances next January in Delray Beach will resonate with the audience as much as his work continues to be alive and vibrant as a muse for me and so many others."

Charles Simic is the author of numerous collections of poems, among them, The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; The Lunatic, Master of Disguises; Selected Poems: 1963-2003, for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; Classic Ballroom Dances, which won the University of Chicago's Harriet Monroe Award and the Poetry Society of America's di Castagnola Award. A collection entitled Sixty Poems was released in honor of his appointment as US Poet Laureate. Simic has also published a number of prose books, most recently Memory Piano, and many translations of poets from former Yugoslavia as well as an anthology of Serbian poetry entitled The Horse Has Six Legs. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review.

A poet, essayist, and translator, Simic also has been honored with the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, two PEN Awards for his work as a translator, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

About his appointment to US Poet Laureate, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said, "The range of Charles Simic's imagination is evident in his stunning and unusual imagery. He handles language with the skill of a master craftsman, yet his poems are easily accessible, often meditative and surprising. He has given us a rich body of highly organized poetry with shades of darkness and flashes of ironic humor."

And the Harvard Review raved, "There are few poets writing in America today who share his lavish appetite for the bizarre, his inexhaustible repertoire of indelible characters and gestures...Simic is perhaps our most disquieting muse."

The 13th annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival will be held January 16-21 at Old School Square in Delray Beach. The Festival features top poets at numerous ticketed public events, including readings, talks, interviews, panel discussions and more. Nine workshops will be offered for which applications are required. The Palm Beach Poetry Festival is generously sponsored by The National Endowment for the Arts, Morgan Stanley, The Legacy Group of Atlanta; the Cultural Council of Palm County, the Palm Beach County Tourism Development Council and the Board of Commissioners of Palm Beach County; The Palm Beach Post; Visit Florida; The Florida Council of Cultural Affairs; WLRN; and Murder on the Beach, Delray Beach's independent bookseller.

Photo by Richard Drew.