Ada Limón

‘I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,  
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high  
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,  
I am asking you to touch me.’   

Ada Limón is the 24th - and current - poet laureate of the United States. She is also the first Latinx woman to hold this position. Her mission as Poet Laureate is to find humanity back in the country she lives in through poetry. In the poet's words, "Poetry is elemental, necessary and extraordinarily human. You feel this when you read poems by Limón: no matter what she describes, the warmth and power behind the words are always palpable. The poet now has six collections of poetry to her name. One of her collections, The Carrying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. She recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her work. Recently, Limón was in the news for partnering with the U.S. space agency NASA: one of her poems will be engraved on the side of a rocket and launched into space. She is an extraordinary writer, but also a gifted speaker. If you want to experience that before she comes to Rotterdam, listen to her reviewer-acclaimed podcast The Slowdown, in which she advocates for a calmer way of life.