I’m Charles, the black sheep
who swims against the rising tide.


Charles Simic is a poet, essayist and translator. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and in 1966 he earned his Bachelor’s degree from New York University while working at night to cover the costs of tuition. Since 1967, he has published twenty books of his own poetry, seven books of essays, a memoir, and numerous of books of translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship and Wallace Stevens Award. Voice at 3: 00 A.M., a volume of his selected later and new poems, was published by Harcourt in 2003. Simic is an Emeritus Professor at the University of New Hampshire where he has taught since 1973 and was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2007-2008. He has two new books, Renegade (essays) and The Monster Loves His Labyrinth (selections from notebooks).

'Feed the Cassowary', Emma Sovich

'Corrective', Sidney Wade
