After growing up in Manhattan, N.Y., as the science-loving child of Chinese immigrants, Arthur Sze began to channel his affinity for the natural world into poetry.

In September, the Library of Congress appointed the Santa Fe, N.M., poet as the 25th U.S. Poet Laureate, making him the first Asian American to hold the office.

As part of Colorado College’s Visiting Writer Series, Sze will come to Colorado Springs for a free reading at 7 p.m. Thursday at Cornerstone Arts Center, 825 N. Cascade Ave. A book signing and reception with coffee and dessert will follow the reading.

“I liked the compression and musicality of poetry,” he told New Mexico Magazine last year. “I knew no other form of writing that was so thrilling and compelling.”

Sze has written a dozen poetry collections, the latest of which was last year’s “Into the Hush,” which won the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement. His collection “Sight Lines, won the 2019 National Book Award for poetry, while “The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems” won the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Award. His 2014 collection, “Compass Rose,” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

The poet also served as Santa Fe’s first poet laureate from 2012 to 2017, and helped establish the creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he served as a professor emeritus until his retirement in 2006.

Sze’s first poem flowed through while he sat in a calculus lecture during his first semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So powerful was his passion for the art form that he soon transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he designed and earned a major in poetry.

After graduating, he moved to Santa Fe, where he taught poetry to kids across the state, including Native Americans at pueblos, and worked construction jobs to earn an income before eventually teaching at IAIA starting in 1983.