Arthur Sze was born in 1950 in New York, raised in Queens and Long Island in a family of Chinese refugees who fled the Japanese occupation in China. He is a poet, professor and an eminent translator of Chinese literature. He graduated from University of California, Berkeley and taught at the Universities of Washington, Brown and Naropa. Sze published 10 books of poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (2015) and was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry (2019).