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