Ada Limón

Ada Limón was born on March 28, 1976, and is originally from Sonoma, California. As a child, she was greatly influenced by the visual arts and artists, including her mother, Stacia Brady. In 2001, she received an MFA from the creative writing program at New York University.

Limón’s first poetry collection, Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press, 2006), was the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize. Her other collections are The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2022); The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018); Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010); and This Big Fake World (Pearl Editions, 2006), winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize. She is also the editor of the anthology You are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2024).

Of Limón’s work, the poet Richard Blanco writes, “Both soft and tender, enormous and resounding, her poetic gestures entrance and transfix.”

A 2001–2002 fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, Limón is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has also won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. In 2022, Limón was appointed United States poet laureate and, in 2023, was appointed to serve a second two-year term. In April of the same year, she served as Guest Editor of the Poem-a-Day series. 

Limón lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and Sonoma, California.