Charles Simic (1938 - 2023) was a Serbian-American poet and co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He published over sixty books of poetry as well as many translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for both Selected Poems 1963-1983 and Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.
He was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and moved with his family to the United States in 1953. The poet Seamus Heaney described Simic’s work as, “Surrealist, and therefore comic, but with a specific gravity in his imagining that manages to avoid the surrealist penalty of weightlessness.”