Congratulations to the new U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limon!
Today, on July 12th, 2022, The Library of Congress has named Ada Limon the nation’s 24th Poet Laureate!
Did You KNow: The Library of Congress has had a poet consultant since 1937. In 1985, an act of Congress officially establish the role that is now known as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. The position is appointed annually.
Limon will officially take over her duties and responsibilities in September from Joy Harjo, who has held the position since 2019.
Did You Know: Harjo was only the second poet laureate to be named to a third term; Robert Pinsky also holds that honor.
Ada Limon was born on March 28, 1976, and she is originally from Sonoma, California. As a child, she was greatly influenced by the visual arts and artists, including her mother, Stacia Brady. In 2001, Limòn received an MFA (Master Of Fine Arts) from the creative writing program at New York University.
Awards and honors
In 2013, Limón served as a judge for the National Book Award for Poetry.
In July 2022, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden appointed her the 24th United States Poet Laureate for the term of 2022-2023.
| Year | Title | Award | Result | hideRef. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | Lucky Wreck | Autumn House Poetry Prize | Winner | [citation needed] |
| 2006 | Big Fake World | Pearl Poetry Prize | Winner | [citation needed] |
| 2015 | Bright Dead Things | National Book Award for Poetry | Finalist | [10][3] |
| National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry | Finalist | [3] | ||
| 2018 | The Carrying | National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry | Winner | [11][3] |
| 2019 | PEN/Jean Stein Book Award | Finalist | [12] |
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Lucky Wreck: Poems- $19.95The poems in Lucky Wreck trace the excitement of plans and the necessary swerving detours we must take when those plans fail. Looking to shipwrecks on the television, road trips ending in traffic accidents, and homes that become sites of infestation, Ada Lim n finds threads of hope amid an array of small tragedies and significant setbacks. Open, honest, and grounded, the poems in this collection seek answers to familiar questions and teach us ways to cope with the pain of many losses with earnestness and humor. Through the wrecks, these poems continue to offer assurance. This darkness is not the scary one,
it's the one before the sun comes up,
the one you can still breathe in.
Celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Lim n's award-winning debut, this edition includes a new introduction by the poet that reflects on the book and on how her writing practice has developed over time.
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The Hurting Kind- $23.99“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.” What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?
With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.
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The Carrying: Poems- $24.00WINNER OF THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
ALA NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018
FINALIST FOR THE 2019 PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD
From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Ada Lim n comes The Carrying--her most powerful collection yet.
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to age parents. A woman struggles with infertility--"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?"--and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: "Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal." And still, Lim n shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. "Fine then, / I'll take it," she writes. "I'll take it all."
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Bright Dead Things: Poems- $17.99A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is “disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.”
A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact—tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker’s sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Ada Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous, accessible, and “effortlessly lyrical” (New York Times)—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
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