There are five Saturdays in this July, so I’m taking tonight off to celebrate his birthday with my husband.
The next regular installment of WOW2 will post on Saturday, July 23rd.
With all the big ongoing bad-news stories these days, it’s all too easy to get caught up in frustration and despair. The “smaller” stories that are good news get overlooked.
So I’m passing on the excellent news that on July 12, 2022,it was announced that Ada Limón has been named as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States by the Librarian of Congress. She is the second Mexican-American U.S. Poet Laureate, after Juan Felipe Herrera (2015-2017).
She will succeed Joy Harjo, the first Native American to be appointed, who is only the second U.S. Poet Laureate to serve three terms (2019-2022).
Ada Limón (1976 –) is an American poet who was born in Sonoma, California. She is the author of The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, Bright Dead Things, Sharks in the Rivers, and Lucky Wreck. In 2015, Bright Dead Things was a finalist for both the National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 2019, The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. She is the host of the poetry podcast series The Slowdown from American Public Media, and a professor at the Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency MFA program. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
“I believe deeply in the power of poetry to help us reconnect with our emotions, our feelings, our true selves. Reading poetry is always my way of remembering that I must be broken open to begin to heal, to find my way to joy. I very much want to amplify the message that poetry can help us reclaim our humanity, that poetry can be a tool to find our tenderness, our vulnerability, and our power again. I think recognizing our emotions, having empathy for other people’s experience, that makes us better people, it makes us braver too.”–Ada Limón