Ada Limón is a Mexican American who stems from Sonoma, California. She attended the University of Washington and got her MFA from New York University in 2001. She received a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, right after graduation, and in 2003 she got a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry.
Why They Made the Worthy 100: In July 2022, Limón was named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, which means she joins some of poetry’s most significant figures, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and William Carlos Williams. Limón is the first Mexican American woman to receive the well-deserved honor. In an interview with the Smithsonian, Limón says of her new position, “I’m very interested in what it is to have identity be a doorway, a place where we can open up to different possibilities.”
