This year the Academy of American Poets awarded $1.1 million to its 2025 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 2025 Poet Laureate Fellows and the communities they serve are Kweku Abimbola (El Segundo, CA), Tommy Archuleta (Santa Fe, NM), Esther Belin (Durango, CO), Colin Channer (Rhode Island), Jen Cheng (West Hollywood, CA), Steven Espada Dawson (Madison, WI), Mag Gabbert (Dallas, TX), Nancy Miller Gomez (Santa Cruz County, CA), Salaam Green (Birmingham, AL), Lester Graves Lennon and Sehba Sarwar (Altadena, CA), Jennifer Militello (New Hampshire), jessica Care moore (Detroit, MI), Caridad Moro-Gronlier (Miami, FL), Jennifer Polson Peterson (Hattiesburg, MS), Poetic X (Caddo Parish, LA), Mateo Quispe (Auburn, WA), Jewel Rodgers (Nebraska), Mattie Quesenberry Smith (Virginia), Ruelaine Stokes (Lansing, MI), Bianca Stone (Vermont), Dujie Tahat (Seattle, WA), and Raffi Joe Wartanian (Glendale, CA).  


Read essays by the 2025 Poet Laureate Fellows on their communities, fellowship projects, writing practices, and thoughts on poetry.

Kweku Abimbola

Drum Language: Toward a Poetics of Re-indigenization

Throughout Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer promotes an ethic of “becoming indigenous,” a relationship in which one cares for the land as if one’s life depended on it.

Tommy Archuleta

Voice: Four Types Explained

Voice: the act of freeing the unsaid.
Steven Espada Dawson

Stump

I wasn’t looking for poetry when I posted the advertisement. I was looking for something to do with my body. 

Mag Gabbert

Everything Is Poetic

Why not at least consider the view that there might in fact be unlimited elemental features within poetry, because perhaps every concept and thing on Earth already contains poetry, is latently teeming with poetry?
Salaam Green

Birmingham, America’s Classroom: A Documentary-Poetry Meditation on How We Get Free

America’s longest and most incomplete lessons bear many names. Birmingham shows us one way we get free: Confront all these names honestly, publicly, and communally. This is what poetry offers when we participate and share.
Nancy Miller Gomez

Bully: A Love Note

Every poem is a vehicle I hope will carry me from self-delusion into self-discovery.
Jennifer Militello

Accidents

A poem makes room. It doesn’t just speak; it listens to your telling. This is the part that is not an accident.
Jennifer Polson Peterson

“Take Your Words and Scrape the Sky”: On Poetry and Public Art

Art tears a hole, however small, in the here and now and offers a glimpse into that other world, the one which, to paraphrase the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard, exists inside this one
Sehba Sarwar

Planting Seeds, Creating Safe Passages

On the night of January 7, 2025, when the Eaton fire erupts in Altadena and Pasadena, the valley is awake. As residents wait for evacuation warnings that are sent too late and fire trucks that never arrive, some climb on their rooftops to extinguish flames.
Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Pearls

While veterans have much to say, what they say does not have to end in silent suffering.
Dujie Tahat

Chapbooks are a type of small, cheaply produced booklet

The chapbook is the length around which my obsessions get exhausted. That is the real reason I write them.

Ruelaine Stokes

Poetry: A Pathway and a Portal into a Sustainable Future

Is it possible everything in the world is engaged in conversation? If I listen deeply, will I be able to hear all the voices?
Jewel Rodgers

No Remedy for Love

I wonder if this is too vulnerable, but for me, poetry is an exploration of the human condition. Vulnerability is my condition.
Poetic X

Jubilee in the Jukebox

Growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, I found poetry in the slums of the city. Many nights I awoke listening to the blues playing in the den.
Lester Lennon

The Eaton Fire: One Poet Shares His Journey

I thought, at seventy-seven, the best of my poetry was behind me, and the future would hold diminishing output. Then the Eaton Fire erupted with its unfathomable winds of one hundred miles per hour.
Raffi Wartanian

Meditations on Metzmama

The suffering Knarig Metzmama experienced fueled her joie de vivre and imbued her with the kind of wisdom and insight that remain accessible regardless of human cruelty. To laugh in such darkness; to sing in such silence; to love despite such hate; to create even with such destruction and erasure.