Charles Simic will be the nation’s 15th poet laureate, the librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, announced today.

Mr. Simic, an emeritus professor of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, will succeed Donald Hall, the current laureate, this fall. Born in Yugoslavia in 1938, Mr. Simic immigrated to the United States in 1954.

“I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English until I was 15,” he said in a statement released by the library.

Mr. Simic, a translator, essayist, and memoirist as well as a poet, counts a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship among his many awards. “Throughout his career, he has been regarded for his short, clear poems in which the words are distilled and precise,” the library’s announcement noted, quoting the opening of his poem “Stone”: “Go inside a stone / That would be my way. / Let somebody else become a dove / Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth. / I am happy to be a stone …” —Jennifer Howard