Ada Limon

For twelve years Ada Limón wrote marketing copy in New York for magazines including Martha Stewart Living, GQ and Travel + Leisure, then quit, moved to Lexington, Kentucky, and made poetry the whole of her working life. In July 2022 she became the twenty-fourth United States Poet Laureate, the first Latina appointed to the post, and held it until 2025. Milkweed Editions brought out The Hurting Kind that same year. Its poems are arranged in four sections following the seasons and keep circling family, animals and what gets handed down; several were written during pandemic isolation and sent privately to friends long before the book existed. It made the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. Born in Sonoma, California in 1976, Limón took an MFA at New York University in 2001, studying under Sharon Olds and Philip Levine. Her earlier collection The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a poem she wrote as laureate, In Praise of Mystery, is engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft.