Poet Laureate Ada Limón's work connects readers to nature. She'll visit Salina this year

United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón is coming to Salina later this year for her first poetry reading in Kansas.

The Salina Art Center, with support from Humanities Kansas and Salina Arts and Humanities, will host a free reading by Limón on Oct. 17.

Julie Mulvihill, executive director of Humanities Kansas, said October is National Arts and Humanities Month and the organization is excited to have Limón in the Sunflower State.

“We are looking forward to celebrating (the) month with this incredible poetry event in the heart of Kansas,” Mulvihill said. “We are honored that Ada said yes to our invitation and that Salina, with its strong and vibrant arts and humanities community and a culture of poetry lovers, offered to host the opportunity.”

As the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, her signature project is called “You Are Here” and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. Limón shared that her new anthology, also called “You Are Here,” includes “poems written for vast and inspiring vistas to poems acknowledging the green spaces that flourish even in the most urban settings,” and she’s hopeful the book will “reimagine what ‘nature poetry’ is during this urgent moment on our planet.”

According to Humanities Kansas, Limón, who will serve as the U.S. Poet Laureate until the spring of 2025, is the author of six books of poetry, including “The Carrying,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her book “Bright Dead Things” was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

Her most recent book of poetry, “The Hurting Kind,” was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and in 2023 awarded a MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant."

Limón also wrote a poem titled “In Praise of Mystery” that is engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft that launches to the second moon of Jupiter, also in October 2024. According to NASA, the poem connects two water worlds – Earth and Europa, and is part of the "Message in a Bottle" campaign, and will be accompanied by the names of more than 2 million people from around the world stenciled onto a microchip.

"The poem and the names will be like a message in a bottle, traveling billions of miles as the mission investigates whether the ocean thought to lie beneath Europa’s icy crust could support life," NASA said in a release about the project.

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Opportunities like this an example of Salina's success

Bringing Limón to Salina is just the latest example of the good things happening in the Salina community, particularly in regards to art.

"We were so excited when Humanities Kansas reached out and wanted to bring this opportunity to Salina," said Misty Serene, executive director of the Salina Art Center.

The art center is currently undergoing renovations to its main building, expected to be finished in May, and Serene said the timing of this opportunity is great.

"Knowing that we would just be through the construction and we would have the opportunity to host a group this size, it just all came together at the perfect time," Serene said.

Serene said people should be excited about the things happening in this community, and the fact that Humanities Kansas chose here is evidence of this recent success.

"Salina just has so much going for it right now," Serene said. "The things that we do with music, poetry, writing and art, we're just functioning at a very high level, so I think this was a great fit for us at the Art Center."

Tickets for the event will be available in August at www.salinaartcenter.org. For more information, visit www.humanitieskansas.org.

This article originally appeared on Salina Journal: US Poet Laureate Ada Limón will visit Salina this October