U.S. Poet Laureate, National Book Critics Circle Award winner, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and a 2024 TIME magazine woman of the year
Joining us in Sonoma in May will be U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. Limón is the author of six acclaimed books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
Limón recently served as editor of a bestselling new collection, published in association with the Library of Congress, entitled, You are Here: Poetry in the Natural World. The poems – by 50 of the world’s most celebrated contemporary writers – challenge what we think we know about “nature poetry,” illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes—both literal and literary—are changing. The collection was a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection and a 2024 NPR “Books We Love” Selection.
Limón’s 2023 poetry collection, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award. Limón is also the author of two children’s books: In Praise of Mystery, with illustrations by Peter Sís, and And, Too, The Fox, released in 2025.
In 2023, Limón was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and was named a TIME magazine woman of the year in 2024. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and wrote a poem that was engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper Spacecraft that was launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October 2024. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, Harvard Review, Pleiades, and Barrow Street.
Limón grew up in Sonoma and attended the drama school at the University of Washington, where she studied theatre, before receiving her MFA from NYU, where she studied with Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, Marie Howe, Mark Doty, Agha Shahid Ali, and Tom Sleigh. Upon graduation, Limón received a fellowship to live and write at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. In 2003, she received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and in the same year won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. Limón hosted the acclaimed podcast The Slowdown in 2021 and 2022.
“That Limón is able to inhabit both past and present in the same moment is part of what makes her poetry so evocative; that she can express it so finely is what makes her an exceptional poet.”—Chicago Review of Books.
“I can always rely on an Ada Limón poem to bring me hope.” – New York Times Magazine.
“[Ada Limón] is one of my all-time favorite writers, someone whose work I return to again and again for solace, inspiration, and truth.” – Nicole Chung, The Atlantic
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