U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón awarded 2023 MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’
We are overjoyed and honored to announce that U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón has been awarded a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant”! The MacArthur Fellowship is an $800,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. Limón is one of twenty 2023 Fellows, including composers, scientists, artists, scholars, and more.
MacArthur Fellows Director Marlies Carruth highlights each Fellow’s dedication to the natural world in her announcement statement:
“The 2023 MacArthur Fellows are applying individual creativity with global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities. They forge stunning forms of artistic expression from ancestral and regional traditions, heighten our attention to the natural world, improve how we process massive flows of information for the common good, and deepens understanding of systems shaping our environment.”
Limón, who has authored six books of poems—including, most recently, The Hurting Kind and The Carrying—heightens our attention to the wonders of the natural world and our connections with one another. Her forthcoming project as our twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, an anthology of nature poems called You Are Here, will celebrate our reciprocal and evolving relationship to nature and place.
“Ada’s work has enriched our relationship with the more-than-human world for decades,” says Publisher & CEO Daniel Slager. “All of us at Milkweed are delighted that she has received this prestigious recognition and privileged to watch her star continue to rise.”
In 2022, two Milkweed authors were awarded a MacArthur Fellowship: Braiding Sweetgrass author and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, and The Home Place author and ornithologist J. Drew Lanham. Letters from Max author and playwright Sarah Ruhl was previously awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006, and Spillville author Patricia Hampl and Cross-Pollinations author Gary Nabhan both received the award in 1990. We are now honored to celebrate all six authors published by Milkweed whose excellence has been recognized by one of the most preeminent prizes in the nation.
Please join us in congratulating Ada Limón!
Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate as well as the author of The Hurting Kind and five other collections of poems.
Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by our most celebrated contemporary writers.
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.
From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, 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.”
From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, an extraordinary collection—at once urbane and earthy—that navigates the thoroughfares and tributaries of human nature.
