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.

Fellows

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. 

Julia Bouwsma

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?

Angelika Brewer

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.

Traci Brimhall

Eat Your Words: A Poetry Cookbook

Poems are emotional nourishment.

Nandi Comer

Michigan Words: Connecting Communities to Poetry Across Two Peninsulas

I hope Michigan Words serves as a bridge—between people, between regions, and between the poet and the passerby.
Patricia Spears Jones

Mortal Concerns: Community, Democracy, and the Weird Mr. Whitman

Now is the time to demonstrate what language can do in a time of crisis—not only to protest the indignities of these times but also to protect our spirits
Alison Pelegrin

“Slapped in the Face by Walls”

My whole life I’ve felt like I was trying to get others to look at something only I could see. Looking out the window for that bird was different. In that room, in the prison libraries, chapels, classrooms and cafeterias where I have led Lifelines workshops, I don’t need to point.
Jean Prokott

Trust the Hours: Poetry to Reclaim & Rename the Sorrow

Much like plate tectonics, poetry is a measure of time, decades and seconds felt equally, refreshed until we pass out or think of better ways to explain what this means.
Emily Schulten

Sound & Sandbox: What Children Can Show Us About Poetry and Play

When we play, tiny miracles form: it feels like the tops of our heads have been taken off; we stop reading to savor the feeling of the flutter in the chest. This is what children know about craft, that knowledge some of us lost somewhere: we need to play, to be reckless, to find fun in playing with forms, and to abandon frustration.
Charlotte Pence

Poetry as Resistance: Teaching Poetry to Justice-Involved Youth

In a system designed to reduce them, to render them invisible, these young people insisted on their presence—their right to be heard.
Lois Roma-Deeley

Creative Writing from Invisible Landscapes: Bridging the Gap Between Generations

The ideal creative writing workshop should provide a safe environment in which writers explore and experiment with various ideas, structures, and genres—and experience the support of serious individuals who, as one notable poet once said during a presentation to my students, sit down to write “with major intent.”
Tess Taylor

Gardening in the Public Flowerfest: On Poetry and Civic Repair

Maybe if we hear and feel the joy of sharing our lives in art, we’ll also see the joy of investing in one another’s stories, words, rhythms, languages, and songs.