Succeeding fellow New Englander Donald Hall, Charles Simic was named the country’s 15th Poet Laureate by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington on August 2. Simic was the 1990 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and he held a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” from 1984 to 1989. Simic describes himself as a “city poet,” and admitted to the New York Times that he began writing poems as a teenager in order to, among other reasons, “impress girls.” His first poems were published in the Chicago Review at age twenty-one. Billington chose Simic from a list of fifteen poets, saying of Simic, “He’s very hard to describe, and that’s a great tribute to him. His poems have a sequence that you encounter in dreams, and therefore they have a reality that does not correspond to the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears.” Simic continues to write for the New York Review of Books, and is the poetry editor of the Paris Review. Harcourt will publish his new collection, That Little Something, in February 2008.