Why write poetry? Ada Limón, 24^th Poet Laureate of the United States, answers: “I write to feel grounded, and alive, and real […] and hopefully, as I work on that process, my poems might help others do the same.”[i] She adds, “I write towards reciprocity, towards connection, towards offering something back to this wonderous suffering planet.”[ii]

These words capture the reasons why Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden chose Limón as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2022, describing her as “a poet who connects. Her accessible, engaging poems ground us in where we are and who we share our world with. They speak of intimate truths, of the beauty and heartbreak that is living, in ways that help us move forward.” Indeed, her capacity for connecting with people across the country earned her an unprecedented second two-year term as Poet Laureate, which ended in April 2025.

Ada Limón, born in 1976 in Sonoma, California, has grandparents of Mexican, Scottish, Irish and German backgrounds. She studied a B.A. in Drama at the University of Washington, followed by an MFA in Poetry at NYU. In order to make a living, she worked in marketing at the N.Y. publisher Conde Nast; in 2010, she decided to move to Kentucky and dedicate her time to writing. She has written seven books of poetry that have won multiple awards, including Bright Dead Things (2015), The Carrying (2018), The Hurting Kind (2022) and Startlement (2025). She has been a MacArthur Fellow and was named one of Time Magazine’s Women of the Year. She was U.S. Poet Laureate from 2022 to 2025, becoming the first Hispanic/Latina to occupy this position.

Poetry as a Search for Connection, Truth and Wonder

Ada Limón’s interviews and collections of poems emphasize the theme of connection, of universal interdependence. Thus, she resists social labels and divisions, gravitating instead towards an honest exploration of our uniqueness within a united whole – whether as a poet, an environmentalist, a woman, or a Latina. Her poetry has been praised for making seemingly effortless, fluid connections everywhere – between the mundane and the sublime, between people and nature. The other threads that seem to run through all of Limón’s work are a search for truth and a call to wonder.

On the topic of writing poetry, Ada Limón continually emphasizes that curiosity is a basic human trait, and that poetry is about asking questions. Thus, “everything about poetry begins with paying attention”,[iii] with taking the time to listen to our external world and our inner self - the “voice beneath the voice” that is within us. As we do so, we begin asking deeper questions which can ultimately lead to discovering personal or universal truths.

Limón has expressed her fascination with exploring these kinds of philosophical questions – the meaning of life, inevitability of death, interpretations of our soul and our place in the universe - that are interwoven into the fabric of our lives. Her straightforward poems have been described as “grounded” or “conversational”; they describe daily lived experiences, that nonetheless invoke profound reflections. Limón’s poems are mostly autobiographical; however, she expresses the hope that her poems resonate widely: “to be an artist is to be constantly widening the gaze as far as you can.”[iv]

For Limón, the next logical step after paying conscious attention is to become aware of the wonder that life contains. Her poetry strives to awaken our awe and the realization that we are deeply connected with everything around us: “how can we constantly feel isolated when without a doubt we are working and living in tandem with all living beings?”[v]

Poetry for Valuing Our Common Earth

Once our deep unity with nature is discovered, Limón’s hope is that this moves us towards care and protection of our common earth: her central projects as Poet Laureate have reflected this. Together with the National Parks Service, “You Are Here” places poems about nature by various renowned poets at seven National Parks; it also invites visitors to reflect on their surroundings and write their own poems. In addition, she was commissioned by NASA to write “In Praise of Mystery”, a poem that is engraved on the Europa Clipper Spacecraft, which was launched to Jupiter’s second moon, 1.8 billion miles away, in October 2024. The poem reads in part: “Oh second moon, we too are made of water, of vast and beckoning seas. We too are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of small, invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark.”[vi]

In addition, the poem “Startlement” was commissioned for the National Climate Assessment. In it, she highlights our essential interdependence: “Species to species in the same blue air, smoke/wing flutter buzzing, a car horn coming./So many unknown languages, to think we have/only honored this strange human tongue […] We know now,/we were never at the circle’s center, instead/all around us something is living or trying to live.”[vii]

On Being a Woman: Natural Essence versus Social Labels

Limón’s poetry related to womanhood reflects her central commitment to emotional honesty. When exploring the issue of infertility, for example, she expresses her feelings of loss in a straightforward way: “What if, instead of carrying/ a child, I am supposed to carry grief?” This strikes a deep chord, recognizing that women’s sense of self is so often tied up with being life-givers. At the same time, she raises honest questions about the time that motherhood requires, and the social expectations that still make motherhood almost a requirement for women (in “The Hurting Kind”, she writes “Once, when I thought I had decided not to have children,/a woman said, But who are you to kill your own bloodline?”).[viii]

The theme of our unity with nature also permeates many of Limón’s poems related to women. “A Name”, for example, puts the responsibility of naming the first animals on the Biblical Eve, rather than on Adam, and conveys Eve’s sense of care and respect for the animals. One of Limón’s most quoted poems, “How to Triumph Like a Girl”, expresses admiration for the strength and determination of a mare in a race, transposing it into her own woman’s body and filling it with self-assurance.

Other poems highlight women’s essential beauty and strength as beings who are part of the natural world, and how this is inevitably stifled by social taboos. “Naked Ladies”, about her childhood love for flowers named this way, exemplifies this: “I told my/parents, I wanted to be a naked/lady. Those flamingo flowers/standing tall along the highways […] I didn’t know then it was wrong /to wish to be a naked lady, wronger/even to wish to be a flower.”[ix] She describes the same contrast between an innocent admiration of women’s free, naked bodies and the later realization of the dangerous reality of exploitation as the context behind her poem “Centerfold”.[x]

Limón’s poetry also touches on social labels and expectations that burden women and add false layers to their relationships: “Wife”, for example, goes through a list of roles women as supposed to adopt after marriage, while “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance” describes the comfort of being able to show one’s true self to a partner without needing to conform to certain standards of beauty.  

In various interviews, Limón has stated that “my mother raised me to be a feminist and I have always been proud to call myself one”. She believes that feminism involves “utilizing our position to advocate for women and elevate women”; at the same time, she places it within the broader context of “building a society that values someone for who they truly are”. Thus, she comes back to the theme of universality: feminism is about “a larger sense of equality for all human beings”.[xi]

On Being Latina: Honoring Authenticity Over Performing Identity

Ada Limón is a third-generation Mexican-American, grand-daughter of Francisco Carlos Limón, who fled from the Mexican Revolution in 1917 and grew up in a foster family in the U.S., where he focused on assimilation and hardly spoke Spanish. Thus, Limón does not speak Spanish and resists simple ethnic boxes, considering herself part of the broader “American story” – a unique ethnic mix.[xii] As she explains in an interview, "I didn't grow up in a bilingual family. I've always identified with Mexican culture, but like many of us, I'm not only one thing. I’m many things. I'm Irish, Scottish, and German too".[xiii]

She is critical of the misguided tendency to pigeonhole Latinos and other groups. This restricts the freedom to be polyethnic, as she explained to NBC Latino: “so many Latinx friends want to be given permission to be seen as ‘containing multitudes’, just like [the poet] Walt Whitman said.”[xiv]

Limón also discusses the two “pulls” faced by Latino writers: on the one hand, the “prevalent literati asking for you to be more Latinx,” and on the other hand, the Latinx community’s expectations to write on certain issues. She emphasizes her discomfort with trying to write for a particular community: “I feel like I would get it wrong. As much as I feel part of the Latinx community, I also feel like poems […] only come from that one voice underneath the voice that’s inside of a singular person.”[xv]

At the same time, she feels strongly about writing poems related to her background that are “authentic to myself”. One of these is honoring her ancestors, including her Mexican grandfather. “I know how much he was an artist. But as someone who crossed the border, lived in a chicken coop, and was subjected to the prejudice and violence that goes along with being a Mexican in California, I feel like it’s my duty sometimes to sing not just about him, but sing for him.”[xvi]

Her poem “Heart on Fire” offers a soulful portrait of him, reading in part: “As a foster child, my grandfather learned not/to get in trouble. Mexican and motherless—dead/as she was from tuberculosis—he practiced words/in a new language and kept his slender head down […] Once,/he was sent for a box of matches and he put that box/of strikeanywheres in the pocket of his madras shirt/and ran home, he ran so fast to be on time, to be good,/and when he did so, the whole box ignited, so he was/a boy running down the canyon road with what/looked like a heart on fire. He’d laugh when he told/you this, a heart on fire he’d say, so you’d remember.”[xvii]

Another issue she feels strongly about is the “performance of identity” that is required of Latinos, which is also stereotyping. Limón is concerned about the “othering” that is increasingly prevalent today, “even among people who think they are doing the right thing; that strange inclusion that feels forced.” In the current political climate, “it’s something that we deal with every day, with the constant hate speech about Mexicans and illegal immigrants, with the ICE raids…it’s hard not to address it because it lives within you.”[xviii]

Her poem “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual” addresses “othering” head on, reading in part: “Do you have any poems that speak/to troubled teens? Bilingual is best […]Don’t read the one where you/are just like us. Born to a green house,/garden, don’t tell us how you picked/tomatoes and ate them in the dirt […] Tell us the one/about your father stealing hubcaps/after a colleague said that’s what his/kind did. Tell us how he came/to the meeting wearing a poncho/and tried to sell the man his hubcaps/back. Don’t mention your father/was a teacher, spoke English, loved/making beer, loved baseball, tell us/again about the poncho, the hubcaps,/how he stole them, how he did the thing/he was trying to prove he didn’t do.”[xix]

Finally, Limón has expressed a sense of responsibility in terms of being the first Latina U.S. Poet Laureate, and the importance of representation. However, she believes that one of the most important things she can model for younger Latino writers and artists is confidence to be themselves, to reject tokenization. She hopes that as an artist, she can “be as expansive as I possibly can”, and that as “someone with Mexican heritage […] there’s a way in which we can make sure that young people can see that.”[xx]

Reaffirming Our Humanity Through Poetry

In recent interviews, Limón has emphasized that we are facing “dangerous times”. With regard to the U.S. humanities in particular, she has called on artists to “hold true to what we believe in…we have to maintain our moral center even as funding sources dry up and even as we are asked to tow the line”.[xxi] She believes that poetry can play a subtle yet powerful role in countering destructive forces, by reminding us to hold on to our sensitivity, empathy and sense of connection: "we often become numb to pain, tragedy and crisis…but poetry is a way to recognize again that we are human beings who feel."[xxii]

Poetry also reaffirms our humanity in the face of AI, which she is morally opposed to using in literature and the arts. In her view, we are “in grave danger of losing critical thought”, and giving away our creative power to an entity without a soul.[xxiii] Thus, she invites us all to find both a refuge and a voice through poetry, underscoring that “it’s not only remaking the self and writing ourselves into the world, but it’s [also] remaking the world”.[xxiv]