New York, NY (July 31, 2025)—The Academy of American Poets, a leading financial supporter of poets in the United States, announced today that it will award $50,000 fellowships to twenty-three poets laureate serving in cities and states across the nation. These fellowships recognize poets laureate for their literary excellence while enabling them to undertake impactful and timely projects that engage their communities through the transformative power of poetry. In addition, the Academy will provide more than $95,000 total in matching grants to twenty-one local 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations collaborating with the 2025 fellows on their work.
“The Academy of American Poets is jazzed to champion wide-ranging poetry projects produced by poets laureate in big cities and small towns alike—all across the country—spanning poetry festivals, anthologies, nooks, and cookbooks to toll-free poetry hotlines, prison workshops, public beach readings, and billboards,” said Tess O’Dwyer, Board Chair of the Academy. “At a time when more readers are turning to poetry to make sense of the world around us, American poets are beacons of free expression, cultural insight, and civic engagement.”
Since 2019, the Academy’s Poet Laureate Fellowship program, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation, has seeded the creation of new laureateship positions across the U.S., with more than forty laureate positions established since the program’s inception. In total, the Academy has awarded $7.65 million in fellowships to 149 poets laureate, plus more than $540,000 in matching grants to secure project support from seventy-nine local 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. Throughout the years, fellows’ programs have reached millions of community members and have included: a series of poetry workshops held in prisons and jails in Louisiana; a monthlong poetry festival co-organized with more than twenty community partners in St. Petersburg, FL; poetry readings during National Suicide Prevention Month and a cookbook project connecting poets and chefs in Kansas; a poetry anthology celebrating salmon runs and poets in Washington State; a statewide billboard campaign in Michigan; the creation of new Youth Poet Laureate positions in Lake County, CA, and Milwaukee, WI; and a toll-free poetry hotline for residents of Philadelphia.
The 2025 Poet Laureate Fellows and the communities they serve are Kweku Abimbola (El Segundo, CA), Mateo Acuña (Auburn, WA), 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), Jewel Rodgers (Nebraska), Mattie Quesenberry Smith (Virginia), Ruelaine Stokes (Lansing, MI), Bianca Stone (Vermont), Dujie Tahat (Seattle, WA), and Raffi Joe Wartanian (Glendale, CA).
About the 2025 Poet Laureate Fellows and their projects:
Kweku Abimbola, Poet Laureate Fellow of El Segundo, California
Kweku Abimbola will hold a series of four intergenerational, generative writing workshops led by Black and Indigenous writers and artists. In addition to bringing diverse groups of poets together, these workshops will highlight Indigenous conceptions of environmental sustainability and ecopoetics, while also foregrounding the often-forgotten history of Black El Segundo. The workshops will culminate in an anthology that features work from El Segundo students and residents that celebrates the natural beauty of the city. Proceeds from the anthology will be donated to restoration efforts after the Altadena and Pasadena fires.
Born in The Gambia, Abimbola is of Gambian, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Sierra Leonean descent. His first full-length poetry collection, Saltwater Demands a Psalm (Graywolf Press, 2023), was selected by Tyehimba Jess to receive the 2022 Academy of American Poets’ First Book Award; it also won the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. In 2023, Abimbola received a gold medal Florida Book Award. He is currently an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University.
Mateo Acuña, Poet Laureate Fellow of Auburn, Washington
Mateo Acuña will launch the Canoe Poetry Nooks Project, which involves the creation of five “book nooks” with bookshelves dedicated exclusively to poetry in community spaces throughout the Auburn area and Muckleshoot Reservation. Made by Muckleshoot carvers, using traditional tools and methods, each bookshelf will appear as an upright canoe with the hull decorated to reflect the particular culture of its location and inscribed with the phrase “poetry helps navigate the waters of life” alongside the Lushootseed translation. The selection of poetry at each nook will be curated with local library and programming specialists. The canoe poetry nooks will also have rugs, chairs, side tables, and lighting, making them places of respite and rejuvenation, inviting community members to discover and enjoy poetry.
Acuña is a queer, trans, Latin, and Indigenous poet, writer, and activist. The former Seattle Youth Poet Laureate, he is the author of the chapbook Dear Spanish (Poetry Northwest, 2024). He has received fellowships from the Jack Straw Cultural Center, UrbanWordNYC, EchoX, and the Future Perfect Project, as well as the 2024 Dwone Anderson-Young Youth Leadership Award for QT-BIPOC activists. Acuña is the youngest ever poet laureate of a city and the first openly queer and/or trans person of color to hold the position in Auburn.
Tommy Archuleta, Poet Laureate Fellow of Santa Fe, New Mexico
Tommy Archuleta will facilitate a series of six poetry workshops at three nonprofit agencies that offer comprehensive services to Santa Fe’s unhoused and recently housed population; namely, The Life Link, St. Elizabeth’s Shelter, and Pete’s Place. The work of participants will be anthologized by a local, independent publishing house and sold in local bookstores, art galleries, and businesses throughout the city, with readings taking place at bookstores and all three Santa Fe Public Library Branches. Additionally, Archuleta will produce a documentary film depicting poetry as a conduit for healing, connection, and voice for the unhoused and the previously unhoused.
Archuleta is the author of Susto (University Press of Colorado, 2023), a 2023 Mountain/West Poetry Series title, which was featured in the November/December 2023 issue of Poets & Writers as part of the magazine’s annual “5 Over 50.” He is also the author of the chapbook Fieldnotes (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2023). A mental health therapist and substance abuse counselor, he works for a local nonprofit mental health agency in Santa Fe.
Esther Belin, Poet Laureate Fellow of Durango, Colorado
In partnership with the Durango Public Library, Esther Belin will pay homage to the Four Corners region in the Southwest with a 4 Corners Poetry Festival. The festival will celebrate the rich stories and poetic forms rooted in the community and connect the people of the region with their deep and complex histories, which include Indigenous homelands, agriculture, mining, higher education, the arts, and outdoor recreation. The festival’s programming will focus on building borderless poetic narratives by highlighting an array of poets, including elder poets over age sixty; Indigenous, Latinx, and LGBTQ poets; and those who identify as multilingual.
Belin is a citizen of the Navajo Nation. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Of Cartography (University of Arizona Press, 2017) and From the Belly of My Beauty (University of Arizona Press, 1999), which won the American Book Award in 2000. She is the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in North American Indian and Indigenous Literary Studies at Michigan State University. Belin is the inaugural poet laureate of Durango, Colorado.
Colin Channer, Poet Laureate Fellow of Rhode Island
Paying homage to the fact that Rhode Island is “the Ocean State,” Colin Channer will launch a reading series at a public beach with three featured readers per event. Community members will be invited to bring chairs and blankets, sit on the sand with their backs to the sea, and enjoy the readings.
Channer is the author of ten books, including the poetry collection Console (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), which was a finalist for the New England Book Award. He is the recipient of several honors, including a 2023 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, a 2022 Cullman Center Fellowship from New York Public Library, and a Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship from Brown University, where he is an associate professor and served as director of graduate studies in the department of literary arts.
Jen Cheng, Poet Laureate Fellow of West Hollywood, California
In partnership with Bravo Medical Magnet High School, Jen Cheng will teach Feng Shui Poetry in the Parks, a project to empower teen students to celebrate joy and care for the environment through poetry. With field trips to local parks and gardens, students will write poetry enriched by education about ecosystems and native plants. The curriculum will offer students wellness tools through the Feng Shui Five Elements as well as the opportunity to create and publish their poetry as a group zine to be distributed throughout Los Angeles County. These youth poets will have a group performance and zine launch party to celebrate their work with their peers and local community.
Cheng is the author of the poetry collection Braided Spaces (Wokelicious Press, 2023). Growing up as an eldest daughter of Hong Kong immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is the creator/facilitator of Palabras Literary Salon, a BIPOC-centered series serving Southern California. As a teaching artist, Cheng has taught at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, UCLA Extension, The Loft Literary Center, Tin House, and at various libraries and community centers.
Steven Espada Dawson, Poet Laureate Fellow of Madison, Wisconsin
Steven Espada Dawson will launch The Triptych Project, a poetry initiative aimed at addressing the realities of mass incarceration in Wisconsin, particularly the disproportionate impact on American BIPOC. The project will raise public awareness and foster creative expression for justice-impacted communities through three interconnected events: a public poetry reading featuring five emerging, justice-impacted poets; a workshop for twenty justice-impacted community members, led by a nationally recognized Black poet; and a radio-hosted reading of poetry written by incarcerated writers at Oakhill Correctional Institution.
Dawson is the author of Late to the Search Party (Scribner, 2025). The son of a Mexican immigrant and originally from East Los Angeles, he is the recipient of a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a 2022 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Dawson has taught creative writing at universities, libraries, and prisons across the United States. He lives in Madison.
Mag Gabbert, Poet Laureate Fellow of Dallas, Texas
Mag Gabbert will launch the Dallas “Sidewalk Poetry Project,” a poetry-centered public art installation that commemorates the historical significance of twenty-eight locations throughout the city of Dallas and provides opportunities for all Dallas residents to participate. Through the project, poems written by Dallas residents will be stamped into freshly poured sidewalks all across town using an accessible, new, Dallas-centric poetry form invented by Gabbert, called the “2-1-Form.” Each featured installation location will be chosen with a focus on equity and inclusion, and with the intention of addressing and healing past instances of harmful erasure. Gabbert will also work with the city's Office of Arts and Culture to create a website that houses an informational video, instructions for residents to submit their work for consideration, and supplemental educational resources.
Gabbert is the author of the full-length collection Sex Depression Animals (Mad Creek Books, 2023), which won the Charles B. Wheeler Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of the chapbook The Breakup (Action, Spectacle, 2023), which won the Baltic Writing Residency Chapbook Prize. Gabbert’s other awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 92NY Discovery Award, and fellowships from The Kenyon Review and Idyllwild Arts. She teaches at Southern Methodist University.
Nancy Miller Gomez, Poet Laureate Fellow of Santa Cruz County, California
In partnership with the William James Association, Nancy Miller Gomez will launch her project which aims to harness the power of poetry to support and uplift youth, providing them with opportunities for creative expression, leadership, and community engagement. In collaboration with the Santa Cruz County Office of Education, the initiative will engage youth in three ways: poetry workshops led by accomplished facilitators; a youth leadership team that will produce an anthology showcasing the poetry of students in the workshops and other youth in the county; and a poetry reading and spoken word celebration organized by the youth leadership team for workshop students to present their poems alongside members of the Youth Poet Laureate program and the poetry community.
Gomez is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books, 2024), winner of the 2025 Paterson Prize in Poetry, and Punishment (Rattle Chapbook Series, 2018). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming. Miller Gomez cofounded the Poetry in the Jails program, an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated writers. She has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails, the Santa Cruz County Juvenile Hall, and as part of Cornell University’s Prison Education Program.
Salaam Green, Poet Laureate Fellow of Birmingham, Alabama
In partnership with the Magic City Poetry Festival and Radical Reversal, Salaam Green will launch Lyrics for Life Birmingham, a ten-week poetry and hip-hop workshop series. The workshops are designed to provide creative expression, personal development, and rehabilitation for youth offenders ages thirteen to seventeen who are incarcerated at the G. Ross Bell Youth Detention Center under the supervision of the Birmingham Family Court system. The program will culminate in a published digital and printed zine featuring participants’ work and a closing ceremony attended by city officials, family court representatives, and District Attorney’s Office officials.
Green, author of The Other Revival (Pulley Press, 2025), is a healing arts practitioner. She is a native of Greensboro, a town in Alabama’s Black Belt region which is known for its rich history intertwined with slavery, sharecropping, and the Civil Rights Movement. She is a Kellogg Foundation Racial Healing Facilitator and Road Scholar with the Alabama Humanities Foundation. Green has held residencies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Auburn University, and The Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation. Green is the inaugural poet laureate of Birmingham, Alabama.
Lester Graves Lennon and Sehba Sarwar, Poet Laureate Fellows of Altadena, California
In partnership with the Altadena Library District, Lester Graves Lennon and Sehba Sarwar will launch “After the Fires: Healing from Histories,” a poetry initiative that seeks to provide space for the Altadena/Pasadena community to document history and heal from the devastation caused by the 2025 Eaton Fire. They will work in collaboration with the library district and local arts spaces to offer monthly workshops and readings that will culminate in a publication and a daylong festival. The participation of Altadena residents, especially those who experienced displacement and/or loss as a result of the fires, will be prioritized. Lennon and Sarwar will build upon the work started by past poets laureate who have been serving the community since 2006.
Lennon is the author of Lynchings: Postcards from America (WordTech Editions, 2022); My Father Was a Poet (CW Books, 2013); and The Upward Curve of Earth and Heavens (Story Line Press, 2003). He is an investment banker, the poetry editor of Rosebud Magazine, and a member of the board of directors of the Community of Writers.
Sarwar is the author of the novel Black Wings (Veliz Books, 2019), and her short stories have been anthologized by Feminist Press, Akashic Books, and HarperCollins India. Her essays and poems have appeared in numerous publications. She is the recipient of honors from a number of organizations, including Los Angeles’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Pasadena’s Cultural Affairs Division, Mid-America Arts Alliance, and Houston Arts Alliance. Sarwar trains youth leaders in Pasadena and Altadena.
Jennifer Militello, Poet Laureate Fellow of New Hampshire
In partnership with the New Hampshire Book Festival and the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, Jennifer Militello will launch the Main Street Poetry Project, which will bring poetry to a broad audience along Main Street in the capital city of Concord, New Hampshire. The project will feature a series of poetry events that are free and open to the public, as well as poems displayed in the windows of fifteen storefronts in Concord in the weeks leading up to the festival. These storefront poems will celebrate not only poems by older, more established New Hampshire poets and contemporary ones but will also include an array of poems written by the state’s high school students.
Militello is the author of numerous books, including Identifying the Pathogen (Tupelo Press, 2026); The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021); and Knock Wood (Dzanc Books, 2019), winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Millay Arts, and New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, as well as awards from Bellingham Review and Red Hen Press, among other honors. She teaches in the MFA program at New England College.
jessica Care moore, Poet Laureate Fellow of Detroit, Michigan
In partnership with The LOVE Building, jessica Care moore will launch a literacy initiative in several neighborhoods across Detroit. Along with teaching artists, she will conduct a series of intergenerational workshops helping to tell the stories of new and native Detroit residents. She will also record and release an audio poetry chapbook connecting the diverse voices of Detroit, and collaborate with Detroit muralists to facilitate large murals with student artists from Detroit Schools.
moore is the author of several poetry collections, including We Want Our Bodies Back (HarperCollins, 2020) and The Alphabet Verses the Ghetto (Moore Black Press, 2003). She is also the author of the children’s book Your Crown Shines (Amistad Books/HarperCollins, 2025). moore is a Kresge Arts Fellow, a Knights Foundation grant recipient, a recipient of a “Courage” Award from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and the winner of an Alain Locke Award from the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Poet Laureate Fellow of Miami, Florida
In partnership with O, Miami, Caridad Moro-Gronlier will launch “Generation 305: An Intergenerational Poetry Project,” which will involve free, multigenerational poetry workshops to preserve the stories of seniors, build community connections, and foster communication across generations. These workshops will be open to K–12 students, their parents, young adults, seniors, and the public. The project will also include a K–12 educational component: in-school workshops taught by community poets to develop civic-minded poetry that promotes intergenerational storytelling and challenges generational stereotypes, creating a new poetic canon that fosters social well-being in the process. The poems created in the workshops will be turned into permanent public art, and Moro-Gronlier will document the project through photographs, videos, recordings, mini-films, and project-specific, original poetry, which she will use to create a digital archive.
Moro-Gronlier is the author of four books of poetry, including Through the Lens and As to Your Comment, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2026 and 2027, respectively, and Tortillera (Texas Review Press, 2021), which won the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize. She has received several honors, including the 2023 Julia Peterkin Literary Award. Moro-Gronlier serves as a senior editor for SWWIM Every Day and poetry curator-at-large for The Betsy Hotel’s Writer’s Room. She lives in Miami.
Jennifer Polson Peterson, Poet Laureate Fellow of Hattiesburg, Mississippi
In partnership with the Hattiesburg Alliance for Public Art, Jennifer Polson Peterson will launch a project that involves two components: first, a new poetry-themed mural on Hattiesburg’s public art trail. The mural will feature a line of poetry by Mississippi poet and civil rights visionary Etheridge Knight: “[T]ake your words and scrape the sky.” This line is intended to serve as a daily reminder of the possibilities of creative expression in the community. Second, a mural-inspired ekphrastic poetry challenge for students. In the fall of 2025, several teaching artists, including Polson Peterson, will hold generative ekphrastic poetry workshops at local elementary schools, inviting students to respond to one or more of the existing murals in the city. A selection of student poems will be published in an internet archive, and the student poetry will be linked to via the Hattiesburg Alliance for Public Art’s online mural exhibit. Students who contribute to the ekphrastic poetry project will be recognized at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Etheridge Knight mural in spring 2026.
Polson Peterson is the author of the poetry collection Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe (Belle Point Press, 2026) and the chapbook Must Resemble Leisure (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022). In 2024, she was appointed the first poet laureate of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, serving through 2026.
Poetic X, Poet Laureate Fellow of Caddo Parish, Louisiana
Poetic X will present three poetry initiatives: the Speak Poetry Fest; the “Put a Poem on It” Mural Project, which highlights poetry in collaboration with visual artists; and a series of poetry workshops.
Hugh Hamilton, known as Poetic X, is a poet and contemporary artist. He has recorded four spoken word poetry albums, including Sip Therapy Speak Poetry Society (Jukebox 7 Records, 2024). He is also the author of two collections, self-published at his imprint, Speak-A-Million Publishing. He is the recipient of many honors, including a 2025 Shreveport-Bossier-DeSoto African American Award, a grant from the Louisiana Office of Cultural Development’s Division of the Arts, and a Kallenberg Artist Tower residency through the Shreveport Regional Arts Council.
Jewel Rodgers, Poet Laureate Fellow of Nebraska
In partnership with Nebraska Arts Council, Jewel Rodgers will launch Homegrown, a decentralized, grassroots poetry initiative that brings poetry into the most personal and familiar spaces—people’s homes, porches, and backyards. Through small, informal gatherings cohosted with Nebraska residents, Rodgers will foreground and reinforce poetry’s communal roots through small-scale conversations, readings, and performances. Rodgers will cohost at least fifteen of these gatherings across Nebraska’s three congressional districts, reaching rural, suburban, and urban communities. Rodgers will also document the project through photos, video clips, and recorded conversations and will make the documentation publicly accessible, offering insight into how poetry fosters connection across Nebraska.
Rodgers has been a spoken word poet for over a decade, performing in schools, festivals, community spaces, conferences, and public events, including 100 Years | 100 Women and Amplifying the Black Experience. She is a three-time Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards nominee for Best Performance Poet and a three-time TEDx speaker. She was a 2022 Union for Contemporary Art Fellow, a 2023 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Populus Fund grantee, and a 2024 finalist in the BlackBerry Peach National Poetry Slam. Rodgers teaches with the Nebraska Writers Collective.
Mattie Quesenberry Smith, Poet Laureate Fellow of Virginia
In partnership with the Central Rappahannock Regional Library, the Friends of Handley Regional Library System, the Peninsula Patriots, the Poetry Society of Virginia, the Richmond Public Library, the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, and the Williamsburg Regional Library, Mattie Quesenberry Smith will launch “Perseverance and Resilience,” a project that supports veterans’ health and well-being through poetry. The project involves regional workshops facilitated by creative writing instructors and contemporary veteran poets; through the workshops, veterans will explore the ways they have persevered and found resilience in challenging times. The project also incorporates a veterans’ poetry contest; the design, production, and installation of the contest winner’s poem on a broadside in facilities serving veterans throughout the state; an anthology of poems collected from the contest finalists and selected entrants; and two public celebrations dedicated to the participating veterans, their families, and the workshop facilitators.
Quesenberry Smith is the author of the chapbook Mother Chaos: Under Electric Light (Finishing Line Press, 2008). She coproduced the film Between Two Fires, which won the CINE Golden Eagle Award and was named Best Documentary at the New York Independent Film and Video Festival. Quesenberry Smith teaches first-year writing and rhetoric at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), where she was selected for the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s All-Southern Conference Faculty and Staff Team in recognition of her service to VMI and her contributions to the local community.
Ruelaine Stokes, Poet Laureate Fellow of Lansing, Michigan
In partnership with the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University, Ruelaine Stokes will create a “Poetry Pathway” for residents of and visitors to Lansing, the state capital of Michigan, by installing a series of lectern signs—each featuring a single poem by a Lansing area poet and artwork by a Lansing area artist—along already-existing walking paths in the Tollgate Drain Wetlands. Poems for the project will be gathered in a public poetry contest titled “We Are Water.” The Poetry Pathway will celebrate the area’s vibrant artistic community, make poetry visible to the wider community, and increase awareness of the need to preserve Michigan’s freshwater resources.
Stokes is the author of Jar of Plenty (Goldenrod Music, 2021). In 2023, she and former Lansing Poet Laureate Laura Apol coedited My Secret Lansing (Goldenrod Music, 2023), a collection of poetry, prose, and photography by sixty-four residents of the tri-county area (Ingham, Clinton, and Eaton Counties). Stokes performs as a member of Voices of the Revolution, a multiracial and feminist spoken word group. She also serves as president of the Lansing Poetry Club.
Bianca Stone, Poet Laureate Fellow of Vermont
Bianca Stone will launch “The State of Poetry,” a traveling community-building initiative with events across Vermont. Each event will feature leaders of the local literary arts community, a writing workshop, and a reading and/or craft talk that will be open to the public. These events will be centered around a chapbook publication called The State of Poetry that will include selected poems from previous Vermont poets laureate and corresponding writing prompts for youth and adults. The craft talks will focus on poems written by past Vermont poets laureate that illuminate and speak to the critical current climate. The events will underscore how poems and poets are vital to our state, connecting community members to the changing landscape, architecture, wildlife, and each other.
Stone is the author of several poetry collections, including The Near and Distant World, forthcoming in January 2026 from Tin House, and What Is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), winner of the 2023 Vermont Book Award. She also collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012), Carson’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone. Stone teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at Dartmouth College, Bennington College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Ruth Stone House in Goshen, Vermont. She hosts the Ode & Psyche podcast.
Dujie Tahat, Poet Laureate Fellow of Seattle, Washington
In partnership with Common Area Maintenance, Dujie Tahat will bring poems into city hall and the everyday machinery of policymaking. Tahat will host “Salonshops,” one-on-one and small group gatherings with civic and elected leaders, citizen boards and commissions, everyday community members, and poets. In these Salonshops, participants will read poems and have conversations about policy and civic life. Through the transformative act of reading poems together, Tahat will create opportunities to confront truths, discomfort, and offer language to reconcile experiences, bringing civic leaders closer to a shared understanding as the pretext to critical policy discussions.
Tahat is the author of three chapbooks, including Salat (Tupelo Press, 2020), winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Award. They have earned fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, Hugo House, the Jack Straw Writing Program, and the Poetry Incubator in Santa Fe, as well as scholarships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. They were a Seattle Youth Speaks Grand Slam champion, representing the city on HBO’s Brave New Voices. Along with Luther Hughes and Gabrielle Bates, Tahat cohosts The Poet Salon podcast.
Raffi Joe Wartanian, Poet Laureate Fellow of Glendale, California
Raffi Joe Wartanian will launch the “San Gabriel Valley Phoenix Poets” project, through which he will work with the areas affected by the 2025 Eaton Fire, especially youths who completely or partially lost access to their schools. The project, which takes its name from the immortal bird in Greek mythology that rises from the ashes, invites community members to mourn, remember, celebrate, express, and recover through poetry. As part of the project, Wartanian will host a series of workshop-readings, “community poetics” encounters, video interviews, and a fundraiser event. He will also create an anthology, broadside bookmarks, a website, a mural, and a scholarship fund.
Wartanian is a writer, musician, and educator. He is the grandson and great-grandson of Armenian Genocide survivors, and, with his siblings, the first generation in his family to be born in the U.S. His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous publications, and he is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, Eurasia Partnership Foundation, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and Humanity in Action. A professor of writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, he serves as the inaugural poet laureate of Glendale, California.
The Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowships panel included poet, editor, and social justice advocate Diana Delgado; former Academy Chancellor and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander; Youth Speaks executive director Michelle Lee; senior program officer at the Institute of Museum and Library Services Dennis Nangle; and 2021–22 Los Angeles Poet Laureate and 2022 Poet Laureate Fellow Lynne Thompson. Final award decisions were approved by members of the Academy’s Board of Directors.
About the Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is the United States’ leading champion of poets and poetry. The organization annually awards more than $1.3 million to poets across the nation. It also operates Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded poetry website, and organizes National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world. Additionally, the Academy publishes Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine, provides free educational resources for K–12 educators and adult learners, and leads the Poetry Coalition, a network of organizations dedicated to promoting the vital role of poetry in our culture.