Who Is Ada Limon, Named As The 24th Poet Laureate Of The United States?

The Library of Congress announced Tuesday that it has named Ada Limón the 24th poet laureate of the United States. Limón, who succeeds Joy Harjo, is an award-winning and popular poet, her acclaimed collection Bright Dead Things has sold more than 40,000 copies. She has published six books of poetry, most recently The Hurting Kind, and also hosts the podcast The Slowdown.

The Library of Congress has had a poet consultant since 1937. In 1985, an act of Congress officially established the role that is now known as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. The position is appointed annually.

Laureates receive a 35,000 dollars stipend, along with 5,000 for travel expenses, the funding originating not from the government, but from a private gift made decades ago by the philanthropist Archer M Huntington.

Limon's one-year term begins September 29 with the traditional reading at the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium, one of the laureate’s few formal obligations.

Who is Ada Limon?

Limon describes herself as polyethnic. She has Mexican and Indigenous ancestry, and on her mother’s side there’s “a lot” of Scottish and Irish.

"I grew up with poetry being in the community,” says Limon, a native of Sonoma, California. “It wasn’t supposed to just be something read on page; it was supposed to be read out loud. I remember going to poetry readings at the bookstore where I worked when I was 16. It’s the oral tradition. That part of poetry has always remained true to me.”

Limón is known in part for her poems about nature and hopes to give readings at parks and other settings that emphasise and celebrate our place in the world.

“Poetry is a way of to remember our relationship with the natural world is reciprocal,” she says. “It’s having a place to breathe and having a place to pay attention.”

Limon said thoughts of previous poets holding the post ran through her mind on receiving the news of her appointment.

"To me, it felt like 'how am I even allowed to stand in that lineage,'" she adds. "And so I took a deep breath, and I said 'yes,' and we all sort of laughed together. An incredible honour and the shock of a lifetime."

“Ada Limon is a poet who connects,” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden says in a press statement. “Her accessible, engaging poems ground us in where we are and who we share our world with. They speak of intimate truths, of the beauty and heartbreak that is living, in ways that help us move forward.”

Limon joins the ranks of such luminaries as Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Tracy K Smith, Robert Penn Warren.

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