United States Poet Laureate

... an American poet, translator, editor, and professor.

He is the 25th United States Poet Laureate, serving his term 2025-26.

On April 14th, 2026, Z was named, uh, to a second term as poet laureate for 2026-2027.

Since 1972, he has published 12 collections of poetry.

And it's also what leads us to making art or making anything that we can that can celebrate it, witness it, and say at the very least, look, you know, listen.

Ada Limon is the author of seven books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award, The Hurting Kind, which was a finalist for the Griffin Prize, and The Carrying, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Penn-Jean Stein Book Award, Startlement, New and Selected Poems, and her pamphlet Against Breaking on the Power of Poetry, adapted from the speech she gave at the Library of Congress at the end of her two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States.

Ada Limon was also awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a 2024 Time Magazine Woman of the Year.

To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website.

Our previous guests, what are they up to now? What's been going on with them? Lena won the National Book Award.

Ada became the United States Poet Laureate.

Jericho and Carl won a Pulitzer Prize.

That's true.

And to be honest, I didn't really know whether they would or not, but I always feel there's no harm in asking, and they were totally up for it.

And then I went on to do an Australian version, and I've currently got the American Poet Laureate of all people who has sent me an early draft of one of his poems-

Wow

... with a view to doing an American version.

I've been at Westminster talking to opponents and supporters of assisted dying after the idea was killed off in the House of Commons.

Supporters say they'll try again, but is it time for a different approach to terminal illness? A quarter of a century after the 9-11 attacks, we hear from the last person to escape the second tower of the World Trade Centre before it collapsed, and from America's poet laureate at the time, with his elegiac tribute, The Names.

Fighting his return to Yemen, threatening another transit waterway for global trade, and staying at sea, a travel writer's verdict on the Cornwall to Silly Isles ferry known as the Vomit Comet.

If you can bear it, stay with us.

I think there's a sort of survivor's feel at the end of it.

The Telegraph's Gavin Haynes.

Let's end with a tribute to those who died in the 9-11 attacks by America's then-poet laureate, Billy Collins.

He's been reading his poem, The Names, at an event in Florida, and he graciously agreed to read it for The World Tonight too.

That's nearly double the value of all deals cleared in the first year of the commission's existence.

Robert Pinsky, who served as US Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000, has received a $100,000 lifetime achievement award from the Poetry Foundation.

Dave Packer, ABC News.

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Today, we're sharing highlights of our conversation with Ada Limon.

She served two historic terms as the 24th Poet Laureate in the United States.

She has brought poetry to public parks across the US, and her words have traveled through deep space engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft.

In over 20 years of writing in celebrated collections like Bright Dead Things and The Carrying and her new book, New and Selected Poems, Ada has brought a sincerity to American poetry rooted in connection to the natural world.