Ada Limón is the current and 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress assuming that prestigious post in 2024. She is also one of the most ardent contemporary feminist voices in verse.
Born in Sonoma, California she is the Mexican-American daughter of Ken Limón and Stacia Brady on March 28, 1976. She says she developed a love for poetry in high school while dedicating her extracurricular activity to theatrical productions. She attended drama school at the University of Washington. After taking writing courses from professors including Colleen J. McElroy, she went on to receive her MFA from New York University in 2001, where she studied with Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Mark Doty, Agha Shahid Ali, Tom Sleigh, and Philip Levine—himself a Poet Laureate.
After graduation, Limón received a fellowship to live and write at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 2003, she received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and in the same year won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry.
To support her writing career, Limón began working in marketing for Condé Nast. She quit this job following her stepmother’s untimely death, which was a catalyst for Limón to decide to pursue her writing career before it was too late.
After 12 years in New York City, where she worked for various magazines such as Martha Stewart Living, GQ, and Travel + Leisure, Limón now lives in both Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma where she writes and teaches.
Limón’s first book, Lucky Wreck, was chosen by Jean Valentine as the winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize in 2005, while her second book, This Big Fake World, was the winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize in 2006.
In a 2014 article in Compose magazine, she wrote:
I went from having no books at all, to having two in the span of a year. I felt like I had won the lottery, well, without the money. I suppose, in my life, I’ve never done things the ordinary way. I’m either deep in the bottom of the well or nowhere near water.
She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte’s low-residency M.F.A. program, and the 24 Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
When her third book, Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010) was released, a reviewer in The Brooklyn Rail observed:
Unlike much contemporary poetry, Limón’s work isn’t text-derivative or deconstructivist. She personalizes her homilies, stamping them with the authenticity of invention and self-discovery.
Limón’s fourth book, Bright Dead Things, was released in 2015. She was shortlisted as a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry. Her 2018 book, The Carrying, won a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her poem State Bird appeared in the June 2, 2014, issue of The New Yorker. How to Triumph Like a Girl from 2013, was awarded the 2015 Pushcart Prize. Her work has also appeared in the Harvard Review and the Pleiades.
How to Triumph Like a Girl
I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.
—Ada Limón
It was announced on January 30, 2023, that she is writing an original poem dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper. Planned for launch in October 2024, the spacecraft is being developed to study the Galilean moon Europa through a series of flybys while in orbit around Jupiter. Limón's poem will be engraved onto the craft.
In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa
Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.
Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.
We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.
—Ada Limón
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