The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems

A poet’s creative process comes to light in this latest book by National Book Award recipient Arthur Sze. Sze has assembled an illuminating selection of seven interviews, three essays, and poems to examine the evolution of his compositions, his decades teaching poetry, and his deep connection to the cultures and landscape of New Mexico.
A son of Chinese immigrants who was born and raised in New York City and on Long Island, Sze first studied science at MIT. His call to write poetry pulled him away from that academic pursuit, but the sciences would continue to influence his writing. In 2024, Sze received the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award for The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press). Sze spent over two decades as an educator, teaching creative writing and poetry to Indigenous students from across America at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). In this compilation, Sze is interviewed by his former IAIA student, award-winning Diné poet, editor, and visual artist Esther Belin.
Sze’s fluency in his parents’ native tongue, along with study at the University of California at Berkeley, allowed him to delve into Chinese poetry, both as a student and translator of classical and contemporary works. The White Orchard shows his wider connection to Asian American poetry across the United States and how he has drawn inspiration from translating Chinese poetry into English. Arthur Sze is one of our finest poets, and this collection demonstrates how literature can enrich us all.

Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and teacher. His twelve books of poetry include The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems; Sight Lines, winner of the National Book Award; Compass Rose, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and forthcoming in Spring 2025, Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press). He is professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe. His poems have appeared in publications including The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Sze’s work has been translated into fifteen languages, and he has given readings internationally in Beijing, Cardiff, Delhi, Havana, Hong Kong, London, Medellín, Paris, Rotterdam, Taipei, and Vilnius. Arthur Sze has lived in New Mexico for over fifty years.