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Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia on May 9, 1938. His childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963. He earned his bachelor's degree from New York University in 1966. From 1966 to 1974 he wrote and translated poetry, and he also worked as an editorial assistant for Aperture, a photography magazine. He married fashion designer Helen Dubin in 1964. They have two children. He has been a U.S. citizen since 1971 and lives in Strafford, N.H.
Simic is the author of 19 books of poetry. He is also an essayist, translator, editor and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught for 34 years. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for his book of prose poems The World Doesn't End (1989). His 1996 collection, Walking the Black Cat, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. In 2005 he won the Griffin Prize for Selected Poems: 1963-200 . Simic's latest book of poetry, That Little Something, was published in April 2008.
Simic held a MacArthur Fellowship from 1984-1989, and has also held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the PEN Translation Prize and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000. On August 2, 2007, the same day he was appointed Poet Laureate, Simic received the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry."
Books of poetry by Charles Simic
What the Grass Says (1967)
Somewhere among Us a Stone is Taking Notes (1969)
Dismantling the Silence (1971)
White (1972)
Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (1974)
Biography and a Lament (1976)
Charon's Cosmology (1977)
Brooms: Selected Poems (1978)
School for Dark Thoughts (1978)
Classic Ballroom Dances (1980)
Austerities (1982)
Weather Forecast for Utopia and Vicinity (1983)
Selected Poems, 1963-1983 (1985)
Unending Blues (1986)
Nine Poems (1989)
The World Doesn't End (1989)
The Book of Gods and Devils (1990)
Hotel Insomnia, Harcourt (1992)
A Wedding in Hell: Poems (1994)
Frightening Toys (1995)
Walking the Black Cat: Poems (1996)
Jackstraws: Poems (1999)
Selected Early Poems (2000)
Night Picnic (2001)
The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems (2003)
Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek under Your Skirt (2005)
My Noiseless Entourage (2005)
60 Poems (2008)
That Little Something (2008)
Translations by Charles Simic
Ivan V. Lalic, Fire Gardens (1970)
Vasko Popa, The Little Box: Poems (1970)
Four Modern Yugoslav Poets: Ivan V. Lalic, Branko Miljkovic, Milorad Pavic, Ljubomir Simovic (1970)
Vasko Popa, Homage to the Lame Wolf: Selected Poems (1979)
(co-translator) Slavko Mihalic, Atlantis (1983)
Tomaz Salamun, Selected Poems (1987)
Ivan V. Lalic, Roll Call of Mirrors (1987)
Aleksandar Ristovic, Some Other Wine or Light (1989)
Stavko Janevski, Bandit Wind (1991)
Novica Tadic, Night Mail: Selected Poems (1992)
Horse Has Six Legs: Contemporary Serbian Poetry (1992)
Aleksander Ristovic, Devil's Lunch (1999)
Radmila Lazic, A Wake for the Living (2003)
Gunter Grass, The Gunter Grass Reader (2004)
Books of Prose by Charles Simic include
The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry (1985)
Wonderful Words, Silent Truth (1990)
Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (1992)
The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs (1994)
Orphan Factory: Essays and Memoirs (1997)
A Fly in the Soup: Memoirs (2000)
The Metaphysician in the Dark (2003)