Ada Limón: “I Have Never Done Anything Alone”
From Her Acceptance Speech For the NBCC Poetry Awards
Ada Limón won the National Book Critic Circle Award for Poetry last night for her collection, The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018).
Limón was also a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the author of four previous collections of poems, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
In her acceptance speech, she quotes Muriel Rukeyser:
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” But she never asked what would happen after that, after the splitting open?
Read the rest of her speech at Book Marks.
