About Seattle Reads 2025

Our 2025 Seattle Reads selection is “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World” by Ada Limón.

About “You Are Here”

In recent years, our poetic landscape has evolved in profound and exciting ways. So has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, “You Are Here” challenges what we think we know about "nature poetry," illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes – both literal and literary – are changing.

“You Are Here” features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Paul Tran. Each poem engages with its author's local landscape – be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop – offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

“I hope this anthology serves as a reminder that there is more time to plant trees, to write poems, to not just be in wonder at this planet, but to offer something back to it, to offer something back together,” wrote Limón in the introduction to “You Are Here.”

Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what "nature" and "poetry" are today, inviting listeners to experience both anew.

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About Ada Limón

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 also the author of two children’s books: “In Praise of Mystery,” with illustrations by Peter Sís; and “And, Too, The Fox,” which will be released in 2025.

She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and wrote a poem that was engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper Spacecraft that was launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October 2024.

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. She will serve as Poet Laureate until the spring of 2025.

Seattle Reads Books and Information for Book Groups

Copies of “You Are Here” will be available at Library locations and throughout the community for informal borrowing by community book groups and individuals.

Print, e-book and e-audiobook copies of “You Are Here” are available in our catalog. We have unlimited copies of the e-audiobook version of “You Are Here” through our Always Available collection, and are ordering more copies of the print and e-book formats. We will also have limited copies of uncatalogued copies of “You Are Here” available for informal borrowing in the coming weeks (meaning you can take them without officially checking them out and return them when you’re done).