Ada Limón
Visiting Poet
Ada Limón is the current Poet Laureate of The United States, and the author of six acclaimed books of poetry, including The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018) which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Limón’s first collection of poetry, Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press, 2006), was the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is also the author of The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2022); The Carrying; Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010); and This Big Fake World (Pearl Editions, 2006), winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize. Of Limón’s work, the poet Richard Blanco writes, “Both soft and tender, enormous and resounding, her poetic gestures entrance and transfix.”
In praising Limon’s most recent collection—The Hurting Kind—as one of the 100 must-read books of 2022, Time Magazine wrote these vital poems remind us that “even the seemingly banal facets of our existence deserve not only observation, but also empathy and amazement."
A 2001–2002 fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and a Guggenheim Fellow, Limón has also received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. In April 2023, Limón served as Guest Editor of the Poem-a-Day series. In the same year, she was the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.
In April of 2024, Milkweed Editions will publish You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a collection of fifty previously unpublished poems written by some of the nation’s most accomplished poets.