U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón's Library of Congress signature project announced, includes anthology of nature poems

Milkweed Editions is thrilled to share Ada Limón’s signature project as the nation’s twenty-fourth Poet Laureate, You Are Here, which will feature two complementary initiatives: a new anthology of commissioned nature poems, and poetry installed as public art in seven national parks.

“I want to champion the ways reading and writing poetry can situate us in the natural world,” Limón says. “Never has it been more urgent to feel a sense of reciprocity with our environment, and poetry’s alchemical mix of attention, silence, and rhythm gives us a reciprocal way of experiencing nature–of communing with the natural world through breath and presence.”

The project will launch April 2, 2024 with the anthology, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world to be published by Milkweed Editions in association with the Library of Congress. It will feature fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author’s local landscape—be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop—offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

“Ada is known and beloved for poems that enrich our engagement with the more-than-human world, and we are delighted to publish an anthology that elevates the work of many of our nation’s most talented and acclaimed poets doing the same kind of work,” says Publisher & CEO Daniel Slager. “Ada’s signature project with the Library of Congress is exciting, vital, and singular—exactly what we have come to expect from Ada.”

You can read more about Limón’s signature project, including the second initiative in partnership with the National Parks Service and the Poetry Society of America, on the Library of Congress website.

Preorder your copy of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World today. Please join us in congratulating Limón on this spectacular initiative!

About Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth US Poet Laureate and the author of The Hurting Kind, as well as five other collections of poems. These include The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limón is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review, among others. Born and raised in California, she now lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

About the Library of Congress Poet Laureate position
In June of 2022 Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden appointed Ada Limón to be the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, also known as the US Poet Laureate. The position has existed as part of the Library of Congress for over eighty years and was named by an act of Congress. Learn more here.