Ada Limon Archive

“We’re standing on the edge of the cliff”: An Interview with Lauren Groff

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Following the conclusion of her Climate Visionaries project undertaken with Greenpeace, Jason Katz speaks with Lauren Groff about writing climate fiction, her climate-related work, and talking to our youngest about climate change.

Refusing Detachment in Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind

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Limón’s new collection refuses numb detachment or an easy forgetting. She affords constant dignity to those whose fragilities are too often framed as liabilities, those who can’t (or won’t) avoid the incessant constellating of experience and memory.

Bullets into Bells: Gun Violence and the Nuance of Suffering

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Days before the fifth anniversary of the shooting at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary school, Beacon Press published Bullets into Bells, an anthology of poetry and prose responding to gun violence. While one might argue such a collection runs the risk of poeticizing violence, it succeeds in quite the opposite.

Making (and Breaking) a Poem

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One of the hardest things to learn about writing poems is how to break lines—where to enjamb or full-stop, where to leave sentences dangling into surprise, where to make one thing appear like it will be another.

Latinx Faculty at Writing Retreats

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Novelist Cristina García and I were recently discussing the diversity of writing communities at summer retreats, and both came to a similar conclusion: writing retreats both new and long-established are devoid of Latinx faculty.

What’s Left?: Poetry after disaster

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What do we do after something terrible happens? Is there any way to find hope in a world gone dark?

The Inaugural Poem under a Trump Presidency: An Adynaton

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If Mr. Trump were to win the November election, all sorts of interesting questions arise: Would he ask someone to write and read an inaugural poem? Would the writer have to get the poem cleared by Trump? Most interesting of all, though: would the poet accept the invitation?

Deliberate Accidents of Discovery: The Trouble With Finding New Latina/o Writers

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In an exercise of radical honesty I’ll share this with you: I almost always find great new Latina/o writing by accident. I think part of this is my pell-mell strategy of finding new books (at literary events, on coffee tables, etc.) though part of it can be attributed to