Ada Limón

Ada Limón was born on March 28, 1976, in 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, selected by Jean Valentine. Her other collections are Startlement: New & Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions, 2025); The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2022), short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize; The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry 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 the editor of the anthology You are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2024). She is also the author of two picture books: In Praise of Mystery (Norton Young Readers, 2024), with illustrations by Peter Sís; and And, Too, the Fox (Lerner, 2025), with illustrations by Gaby D’Alessandro. 

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 Memorial Foundation Fellow, Limón is also the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. 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. As poet laureate, her signature project was called You Are Here, which focused on placing poetry installations in National Parks across the country and releasing an anthology of new nature poetry. She wrote a poem that was engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper Spacecraft and launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October 2024. She was named a Time magazine woman of the year in 2024.

Limón lives in Glen Ellen, California.