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.
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.
