Ada Limón, author of AGAINST BREAKING: ON THE POWER OF POETRY

Ada Limón is likely best known for her role as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. Her signature project, "You Are Here," focused on connecting poetry with the natural world, including installations in seven National Parks. She also wrote "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa," which was engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft which launched in 2024 to explore Jupiter’s icy moon.   Ada is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Startlement, The Hurting Kind, which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim and was named a 2024 Time Woman of the Year.   Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, is the speech she delivered when she left her post as Poet Laureate last year. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about her work as Poet Laureate and how she used her platform to talk back against this political moment. She discusses her job as a creative and her job as an advocate and gives us a glimpse behind her process. She also reads and discusses her poem, “The Endlessness,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 2023. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded May 12, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)