Ada Limón 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 wrote a poem that will be engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper Spacecraft that will be launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October 2024. As the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. She will serve as Poet Laureate until the spring of 2025. In October of 2023, she was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, and she was named a TIME magazine woman of the year in 2024.
Join U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón and Caldecott Honoree Peter Sís for a reading and discussion of their transcendent new children's book. The book features Limón's poem “In Praise of Mystery,” which will be engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft that launches to Jupiter and its moons in October 2024. Published as Limón’s debut picture book, this luminous poem is illustrated by internationally renowned artist Peter Sís. In Praise of Mystery celebrates humankind’s endless curiosity, asks us what it means to explore beyond our known world, and shows how the unknown can reflect us back to ourselves.
About the Presenters
Ada Limón. Photograph by Lucas Marquardt
Peter Sís. Photograph by Jan Slavík © DOX CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
Peter Sís is an internationally acclaimed author, artist, and filmmaker. He has received the Robert F. Sibert Medal, three Caldecott Honors, the Society of Illustrators’ Gold Medal, and a Sydney Taylor Honor. He was the first children’s book creator to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2003. He also won the 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Award. His work for children has won six New York Times Book Review’s Best Illustrated Book awards. Sís’s films have won the West Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear Award, the Grand Prix Toronto, and the Cine Golden Eagle Award. He collaborated with Bob Dylan on “You Got to Serve Somebody” (1983). A selection of his films is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.