Poetry & the Creative Mind 2025

Ada Limón

Ada Limón is the author of several collections, including 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; and 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.

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. She wrote a poem that was engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper Spacecraft and launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October 2024. Limón was named a Time magazine woman of the year in 2024.

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Ricardo Maldonado

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. A graduate of Tufts and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, he is the Academy of American Poets's President and Executive Director.

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Sofia Kamal

Sofia Kamal is a Pakistani Muslim writer born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. She will be moving to New York City to attend Columbia University, where she will study mathematics and visual arts.

Kamal’s writing and visual art have been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and YoungArts, as well as by The Adroit Journal ’s Summer Mentorship Program and Tempe Festival of the Arts. Additionally, she served as the 2024 National Student Poet for the Southwest and as an editor for the student-run literary magazine Pegasus.

Danielle Deadwyler

Danielle Deadwyler has been performing in theater and the arts since childhood, building a foundation for her professional career. She is a Gotham Award winner and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Critics Choice, Independent Spirit, and NAACP award nominee. She can currently be seen starring in the thriller The Woman in the Yard. Upcoming, she stars in the independent features 40 Acres and The Saviors, both of which she also executive produced. Deadwyler will soon begin production alongside Steve Carell in HBO’s untitled comedy series from Bill Lawrence, Matt Tarses, and Warner Bros. TV, as well as the Fifth Season film Otis & Zelma, for which she serves as executive producer and stars alongside John Boyega. Other film and television credits include The Harder They Fall, Watchmen, Atlanta, the feature adaptation of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, Till, and the action-thriller Carry On(the second most popular film ever on Netflix).

Natalie Batalha

Natalie Batalha is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics and the director of astrobiology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). She uses ground and space-based telescopes to find and characterize planets orbiting other stars in the galaxy, with the ultimate goal of searching for evidence of life beyond the solar system.

Prior to UCSC, Batalha was at NASA’s Ames Research Center, where she spent twenty years working on a space mission (named after Johannes Kepler) that detected thousands of planets orbiting other stars in the galaxy and showed that potentially habitable planets are common.

For her work on Kepler, Batalha was awarded a NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal and the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in Physical Sciences.

Fran Lebowitz

Fran Lebowitz's essays and interviews offer her acerbic views on current events, the media, and her pet peeves.

Her first book, a collection of essays titled Metropolitan Life, was a bestseller, as was a second collection, Social Studies. Her two books are collected in The Fran Lebowitz Reader, with a new preface by the author. It has been published in nine languages, including French, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Lebowitz is also the author of the children’s book Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas.

Between 2001 and 2007, Lebowitz had a recurring role as Judge Janice Goldberg on the television drama Law & Order. She also had a part in the Martin Scorsese-directed film The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). She has appeared in various documentaries, including the American Experience series on New York City, as well as Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016), Regarding Susan Sontag (2014), and Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol (1990). In 2010, Scorsese directed a documentary about Lebowitz for HBO titled Public Speaking. A limited documentary series, Pretend It’s a City, also directed by Scorsese, premiered on Netflix in 2021 and was nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series category. In 2021, Lebowitz was awarded the Forte dei Marmi Festival della Satira Lifetime Achievement Award and was a recipient of the 2021 Foreign Press Honorary Award, an honor given by the Foreign Press Correspondents Association. Lebowitz was named to Vanity Fair’s International Best-Dressed List Hall of Fame in 2008.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner’s plays include A Bright Room Called Day, Angels in America, Slavs!, Homebody/Kabul, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, and the musical Caroline, or Change, with composer Jeanine Tesori. He has adapted Pierre Corneille’s The Illusion, S. Y. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, and Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan and Mother Courage and Her Children. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story, and The Fabelmans. His books include Wrestling With Zion, coedited with Alisa Solomon; Brundibar, illustrated by Maurice Sendak; and The Art of Maurice Sendak, 1980 to the Present. Among other honors, Kushner was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.

Morgan Spector

A classically trained stage actor, Morgan Spector's upcoming performance can be seen in HBO’s original series The Gilded Age, in its highly anticipated third season, which is set to be released later this year. The cast received a 2024 Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series for Season Two.

Also upcoming, Spector is set to star in David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano’s comedy horror I Don’t Understand You. The film premiered at SXSW 2024 and Vertical is set to release the film theatrically on June 6. Spector will also star in the Netflix limited series Black Rabbit opposite Jason Bateman and Jude Law. His additional television credits include HBO’s adaptation of The Plot Against America, Homeland (Showtime), Boardwalk Empire (HBO), and Allegiance (NBC). On the big screen, his credits include Matt Ruskin’s Boston Strangler. On stage, Spector made his Broadway debut in 2010 in Gregory Mosher’s Tony Award-winning revival of Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridge.

Lawrence O’Donnell

Lawrence O’Donnell is the host of The Last Word on MSNBC. Formerly an Emmy Award-winning executive producer and writer for The West Wing, O’Donnell also served as senior advisor to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), chief of staff to the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works and the Senate Finance Committee. He is the author of Deadly Force, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.

Christine Baranski

Christine Baranski is an Emmy Award, two-time Tony Award, Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award, Drama Desk Award, and American Comedy Award winner. A graduate of The Juilliard School, Baranski received her big break in Tom Stoppard’s hit Broadway comedy The Real Thing, directed by Mike Nichols, for which she won a Tony and Drama Desk Award. Baranski went on to earn her second Tony for her performance in Neil Simon’s Rumors. She also won an Emmy, an American Comedy Award, and a SAG Award for her performance in the hit CBS series Cybill, in addition to receiving three subsequent Emmy nominations. Baranski received five more Emmy nominations for her guest roles on Frasier and The Big Bang Theory.

As the formidable “Diane Lockhart” on The Good Wife, Baranski received six Emmy nominations and two Critics’ Choice Television Award nominations for her performance on the CBS series. She then starred as the character in the critically acclaimed spinoff The Good Fight. Baranski has been nominated for four Critics’ Choice Television Awards, as well as receiving both a Golden Globe Award nomination and TCA Award nomination, for her performance in the spinoff.

Baranski also earned an Emmy nomination for her current role as “Agnes Van Rhijn” in the HBO series The Gilded Age, from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, which has been renewed for a third season.

Baranski has recently completed Season Two of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, playing the role of “Victoria.” The series is based on the novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty.

Some of Baranski’s notable film credits include The Birdcage, Chicago, Mamma Mia!, and Miss Sloane. Her previous stage credits include Sweeney Todd, for which she won the 2003 Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Lead Actress, Resident Musical; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for which she won an Obie Award in 1983; and Mame at The Kennedy Center. Baranski received an honorary doctorate from Juilliard, and in 2018, was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.

Tess O’Dwyer

Tess O’Dwyer serves as chair of the board of directors for the Academy of American Poets. She provides strategic planning and fundraising counsel to leaders of the nonprofit sector. Her client roster includes cultural museums, performing arts companies, social justice agencies, schools, and universities. Prior to her consultancy, O'Dwyer served as Vice President for Cultural Affairs at the Americas Society, Director of Development at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Associate Director of Individual Giving at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. She earned her MA in English from Rutgers University and is also an award-winning translator of Latin American and Puerto Rican poetry and fiction. Her books in translation include the social realist novel Martin Rivas (Oxford, 2000) by Alberto Blest Gana and the postmodern classics Empire of Dreams (Yale, 1994) and Yo-Yo Boing! (AmazonCrossing, 2011) by Giannina Braschi. O’Dwyer co-edited Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (Taylor & Francis) and Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Winner of the Columbia University Translation Center Award, she has served as a Board member of Harvard University’s Cultural Agents Initiative, The Evergreen Review, and PEN America.

Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes is the author of seven collections of poetry, including American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Poets, 2018), which received the 2019 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award for Poetry and the 2020 Bobbitt Prize, and was a finalist for the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and was short-listed for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize; and How to Be Drawn (Penguin Books, 2015), a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry; Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), which won the National Book Award for Poetry.

Hayes’s other honors and awards include a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, and three Best American Poetry selections, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Hayes served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2017 to 2022. He also served as an ex officio member of the Academy’s Board of Directors. In 2022, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Stephen King

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. Holly was a New York Times Notable Book of 2023, and 11/22/63 was named a top-ten book of 2011 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. King is the recipient of the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Special Thanks

Readers

Christine Baranski
Natalie Batalha
Danielle Deadwyler
Terrance Hayes
Sofia Kamal
Stephen King
Tony Kushner
Fran Lebowitz
Ada Limón
Lawrence O’Donnell
Morgan Spector

Executive Producers

Lawrence Berger and Anouk Markovits
Patricia H. Grodd and Michael Stone
Alexandra C. Jackson
Susan and John Jackson
Tess O’Dwyer
Andrew Schiff and Alexandra Wolfe Schiff
Elizabeth Sobol

Producers

Bernstein Private Wealth Management:
Donald Kent and Frank Cassaniti
Eric Rayman
Jeannette Watson Sanger
Maurice Tempelsman

Associate Producers

Linda Nemec Foster
Michael Jacobs and Sheridan Hay
James Johnson
Camille Lannan and Yury Gitman
Steve Talbert
Chaim Wachsberger
Elizabeth Wade and Colin Rafferty

Sponsors

Poetry Foundation
Penguin Random House
T. S. Eliot Foundation
HarperKids
Greenwillow Books
W. W. Norton & Company
Fortier Public Relations
Expedition Press

Media Sponsor
WNYC
Listen at wnyc.org or download the WNYC app.

Additional support from

Ellen Adler, Virginia Anderson, Michael A. Boyd, Sidney Clifton, Georgia Court, Margaret H. Douglas-Hamilton, Dennis Gallagher, Tracie D. Hall, Tom Healy and Fred P. Hochberg, Helen & Frank Houghton, Maisie K. Houghton, Marilyn Kallet, Kim Kaufman, Susan Levin Schlechter, Jessica and Paul Maich, Ricardo Maldonado, Susan E. Master, Bruno Navasky and Melissa Ozawa, Kaye C. Newbury, Gabriella Page-Fort, David and Susan Rockefeller, Elda Rotor, Cynthia J. Schumacher, and Eric Warren