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 full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published a year after his graduation from New York University. Since then, he has published over sixty books abroad and in the United States, for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship and the Wallace Stevens Award. He is Emeritus Professor of the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973, and a past Poet Laureate of the United States. His translation of Serbian poet Novica Tadić’s Dark Things was published by BOA Editions in 2009.