Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying (2018), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and Bright Dead Things (2015). In 2022, Limón was appointed the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. Her sixth collection, The Hurting Kind, was called "one of the most anticipated books of 2022" by LitHub. She has received many honors, including a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA and a Guggenheim Fellowship. From fall 2021 through fall 2022, Limón hosted the acclaimed poetry podcast The Slowdown.
Of Mexican-American descent, Limón was raised in the North Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in California. She studied theatre in college, then earned her MFA from New York University in 2001. Her first two books came out within a year of each other in 2006, winners of simultaneous contests: Lucky Wreck and This Big Fake World: A Story in Verse. A third poetry book, Sharks in the Rivers, followed in 2010. In 2010-2011, Limón took a leap of faith and left a New York City marketing position with Condé Nast to be a full-time poet, supporting herself with book sales, tours and readings. At first, she recalls, she expected to write fiction in order for this career choice to become lucrative, but could not resist her calling as a poet.
Her next two poetry collections, Bright Dead Things (2015) and The Carrying (2018), both received widespread critical acclaim, with several poems shared widely online, including "Dead Stars" and "Instructions on Not Giving Up." Bright Dead Things speaks about intimacy and relationships, loss, travel, and her cross-country move to Kentucky to follow her partner Lucas's work in the horse racing industry. It was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (which she later won for The Carrying). The Carrying further cemented Limón's conversational and accessible yet prophetic literary voice, interweaving personal experience of infertility, domestic life, and natural surroundings with ambitious topics of gun violence, climate crisis, and racism. Two poems from these collections, "How to Triumph Like a Girl" (2015) and "The Leash" (2018), were awarded the Pushcart Prize. Her 2022 book The Hurting Kind, out the same year she became U.S. Poet Laureate and written in part during the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic, focuses on sensitivity and interconnectedness across distance and the changing seasons.
Ada Limón lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her husband Lucas and pug Lily Bean. Her work is known for its autobiographical detail, vulnerability, natural and feminist themes, and startling emotional observations. Deeply personal, often mundane details of life transcend to an ambitious universal human spirit. Readers are at times invited to dwell with the poet in loss, love, loneliness, or desperation, and to pass through them together to a more profound and thriving form of life.
Ada Limón's poem "Dead Stars" was published in her 2018 book The Carrying. In it, the speaker observes stars in the night sky, thinks about the idea that humans are comprised of stardust, and imagines how people might rise to their full potential...
"The End of Poetry" is the final poem in Ada Limón's sixth book, The Hurting Kind (2022). Limón, considered "one of America's preeminent poets" by Publishers Weekly and named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2022, takes an ironic approach in this poem:...
"How to Triumph Like a Girl" is the opening poem from Ada Limón's 2015 book Bright Dead Things. The poem is a celebration of female triumph as the speaker finds kinship between her body and the wild, animal power of racehorses. In the years...
"Instructions on Not Giving Up" is a fourteen-line unrhymed poem about spring and resilience by 24th U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. Limón wrote the poem in one rush of inspiration, immediately after walking her dog through streets littered with...
"The Leash" by Ada Limón is a free-verse poem discussing how to resist despair, through the scene of the speaker walking her dog. The poem consists of one long stanza of thirty-three lines, with no consistent form of rhyme or meter. Limón blends...
Ada Limón was born in 1976 in Sonoma, California, a home she would leave but look back fondly on during her poetic career. Limón's interest in creative writing grew at the University of Washington, where as an undergraduate she studied theatre in...
Ada Limón's poem "Wife" appears in her 2018 book, The Carrying. The speaker reflects on her lingering discomforts with the word, "wife," and how it implies a restrictive domestic role and rigid archetype. She expressed her distaste for and...
