This year the Academy of American Poets awarded $1.1 million to its 2024 Poet Laureate Fellows. The Academy’s Poet Laureate Fellowships recognize laureates’ literary excellence while enabling them to undertake projects that enrich their communities through responsive and interactive poetry activities. This program is made possible by support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The 2024 Poet Laureate Fellows and the communities they serve are: Julia Bouwsma (Maine), Angelika Brewer (Ogden, UT), Traci Brimhall (Kansas), Ching-In Chen (Redmond, WA), Kai Coggin (Hot Springs, AR), Nandi Comer (Michigan), Tongo Eisen-Martin (San Francisco, CA), Heid E. Erdrich (Minneapolis, MN), Andrea Gibson (Colorado), Amanda Johnston (Texas), Patricia Spears Jones (New York), Alison Pelegrin (Louisiana), Charlotte Pence (Mobile, AL), Georgia A. Popoff (Onondaga County, NY), Jean Prokott (Rochester, MN), Joseph Rios (Fresno, CA), Lois Roma-Deeley (Scottsdale, AZ), Emily Schulten (Key West, FL), Tess Taylor (El Cerrito, CA), Arianne True (Washington State), Kerri Webster (Idaho), and avery r. young (Chicago, IL).
Learn more about the 2024 Poet Laureate Fellows, their communities, fellowship projects, writing practices, and thoughts on poetry, by reading these interviews and essays from their fellowship year.
Dear Reader—Reaching Toward Community in a Time of Winter
What are the poems that need me to write them now? And what do these poems need from me?
Creativity: The Human Super Power
My work has never been about teaching people to be creative; it has always been about letting people be creative.
