Each spring, amazing things pop up in the meadows of Mount Rainier National Park. This June, it was poet Ada Limón, ’98, who visited the mountain as part of her “You Are Here: Poetry in Parks” project. The U.S. Poet Laureate designed the project to serve both poetry and the natural world. “At a time when it feels easy to surrender to the heartbreak of humanity, I want to make room for hope,” she says in the National Parks video introducing the project. “I want this project to remind us of our love for the earth.”
Raised in Sonoma, California, Limon attended the University of Washington with support from the Educational Opportunity Program. She nurtured her creativity in the Drama Department as she pursued her bachelor’s degree surrounded by, in her words, “free spirits and risk takers.” After graduation, she left for the East Coast and earned her Master of Fine Arts at New York University before making her home in Lexington, Kentucky.
Ada Limón visited Mount Rainier National park in June, making the national monument the second stop in her ‘You Are here: Poetry in Parks’ project with the National Park Service, Library of Congress and Poetry Society of America.
In 2022, Limón was named the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate. The following year, she was awarded a MacArthur fellowship and then appointed to an unprecedented second, two-year term as the nation’s poet laureate, a role she will hold until April.
Throughout this summer and fall, Limón traveled to seven national parks, from Cape Cod to the Redwood National and State Parks near the California coast. At Mount Rainier’s Jackson Visitor Center, she unveiled a picnic table with an overlay featuring A.R. Ammons’ poem “Uppermost.” To serve those who might not be able to visit a park, she also curated “You Are Here,” a book of 50 original nature poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world.