“Look, we are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?”
Ada Limón is a poet of intimacy and openness, fragility and ferociousness, sincerity and doubts. She has published six collections of poetry, including This Big Fake World, which won the Pearl Poetry Prize. In 2022 was appointed to the role of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the nation’s only federally-endowed position for poets. Limón has a powerful penchant for creating works that revel in a personal connection between reader and poet, basking in the shared experiences, both bad and good, that stitch humanity together. 
Consider this quote, from her 2015 collection Bright Dead Things:
“Isn&#8217;t it funny? How the cold numbs everything
but grief.
If we could light up the room with pain,
we&#8217;d be such a
glorious fire.”
Tone is a remarkable conveyance for meaning; by beginning the stanza with the rhetorical question “isn’t it funny?” Limón sets a conversational tone, which draws us in. She then introduces grief, that often grueling emotional process, but flips it on its head, having found a way to frame that fiery emotion as a bringer of light rather than destruction. This ability to find strength in weakness, use trauma to connect us and show, in an accessible way, how pain is experience, and we shine all the brighter for it, is ultimately indicative of why she was selected as our nation’s key poetic ambassador, and why she has earned a place in poetic canon for eternity.
Her journey to poetry is affirming, showing how our true passions always find us. Growing up in Sonoma, California, her parents divorced when she was young and they both remarried. Though poetry interested her early on, Limón initially traveled the theater route, eventually getting a B.A in Drama from the University of Washington in 1998. She then pursued an MFA in poetry from New York University, and later took a marketing job with Conde Nast. During her tenure in the publishing world, she put out three poetry collections: This Big Fake World: A Story in Verse (2005), Lucky Wreck (2006), and Sharks in the Rivers (2010). 
Poetry pushed its way back into her life full-time when her step-mother died suddenly in 2010. Empowered with a new understanding of how life is fleeting, she committed herself completely to poetry writing. During this time, she published Bright Dead Things (2015), which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2018, she published The Carrying, which did win the National Book Critics Award, and then came out with The Hurting Kind in 2022. She was named the 24th U.S Poet Laureate by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. On earning the title, Limón is quoted saying, “What an incredible honor to be named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. Again and again, I have been witness to poetry&#8217;s immense power to reconnect us to the world, to allow us to heal, to love, to grieve, to remind us of the full spectrum of human emotion.” She currently lives in Kentucky with her husband.
-Abby Edgecumbe