Simic, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for his book of prose poems, The World Doesn't End (1989), was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938. Following a traumatic childhood there during World War II, he emigrated to America in 1954, with his mother and his brother to join his father in Chicago, where Simic lived until 1958.
Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961, Simic earned a bachelor's degree from New York University, working nights to cover tuition costs.
Simic's first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published in 1967. He has published more than 60 books in America and around the world, including 20 titles of his own poetry.
Works by Simic include That Little Something (Harcourt 2008); My Noiseless Entourage (2005) and Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Other works include The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); Night Picnic (2001); The Book of God and Devils (2000) and Jackstraws (1999), which was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times.
Books of prose by Simic include The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, Notes on Poetry (1985); Dime Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (1992); The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs (1994) and A Fly in the Soup: Memoirs (2000).
Simic held a MacArthur Fellowship fom 1984-89, and has also held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the PEN Translation Prize and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Simic was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000. On Aug. 2, 2007, he same day he was appointed Poet Laureate, Simic received the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
The free public event is sponsored by the UD Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences.
