W.S. Merwin named U.S. Poet Laureate

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has announced the appointment of W.S. Merwin as the Library’s 17th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2010-2011. Merwin will take up his duties in the fall, opening the Library’s annual literary series on October 25 with a reading of his work.

William Stanley Merwin succeeds Kay Ryan as Poet Laureate and joins a long line of distinguished poets who have served in the position, including Charles Simic, Donald Hall, Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, Rita Dove and Richard Wilbur. During a 60-year writing career, Merwin has received nearly every major literary award. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, just recently in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius and in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders. In 2006, he won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress for Present Company. His retrospective collection Migration: New and Selected Poems won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry.

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