Altadena Poets Laureate Peter J. Harris and Carla Rachel Sameth Named—along with 22 other poets—2023 Poet Laureate Fellows by the Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets announced today that it is awarding $50,000 each to its 2023 Poet Laureate Fellows for a combined total of $1.1 million. These fellows serve as poets laureate of states, counties, and cities across the United States and will be leading public poetry programs in their respective communities in 2023–24. The Academy will additionally provide $114,500 total in matching grants to help secure the pledged support of the Fellows’ projects from twelve local 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations.
“The Academy of American Poets celebrates the unique position poets laureate occupy at state and local levels, elevating the possibilities poetry can bring to community conversations and reminding us that our national spirit can be nourished by the power of the written and spoken word,” said Ricardo Maldonado, president and executive director of the Academy. “We are inspired by these projects—which include intergenerational workshops, city- and statewide festivals, community-generated publications, and more—that the twenty-three Fellows will carry out, and grateful to the Mellon Foundation and the nonprofit organizations supporting this life-affirming work.”
Through its Poet Laureate Fellowship program, the Academy of American Poets—a leading financial supporter of poets in the United States—has awarded a total of $5.45 million in fellowships to one hundred and five poets laureate since 2019, plus more than $360,000 in matching grants to secure project support from forty-seven local 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. In addition to helping these Fellows reach tens of thousands of individuals in ninety-three different communities through creative and timely poetry programs, the Academy has helped encourage the creation of more than forty new poet laureate positions across the nation since launching this program. The fellowships are made possible by the Mellon Foundation, which awarded the Academy two grants to fund the program.
“Collectively the voice and vision of these twenty-three poets laureate will bring together community members through the craft and creativity of poetry and illuminate place through words,” said Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation. “We are proud to continue our support of the Poet Laureate Fellowship program and to honor the Academy of American Poets’ enduring commitment to the unique power of poetry.”
“We want to thank the following panelists for their generous investment of time and expertise in recommending the recipients of the 2023 Fellowships: Francisco Aragón, the founding director of Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies; Ed Madden, the former poet laureate of Columbia, South Carolina; Olivia Morgan, the founder of National Student Poets; and Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. poet laureate and a member of the Academy’s Board of Chancellors,” said Tess O’Dwyer, Board Chair. Final award decisions were approved by members of the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Directors.
The 2023 Poet Laureate Fellows and the communities they serve are Diannely Antigua (Portsmouth, NH), Lisa Bickmore (Utah), Jennifer Bartell Boykin (Columbia, SC), Joseph Bruchac (Saratoga Springs, NY), Lauren Camp (New Mexico), Laura Da’ (Redmond, WA), Oliver de la Paz (Worcester, MA), Farnaz Fatemi (Santa Cruz County, CA), Nicholas Gulig (Fort Atkinson, WI), Peter J. Harris and Carla Rachel Sameth (Altadena, CA), Taylor Johnson (Takoma Park, MD), Yalie Saweda Kamara (Cincinnati, OH), Brandy N?lani McDougall (Hawai?i), Gloria Muñoz (St. Petersburg, FL), Sharon Kennedy-Nolle (Sullivan County, NY), Shin Yu Pai (Seattle, WA), Willie Perdomo (New York), Jason Magabo Perez (San Diego, CA), Glenis Redmond (Greenville, SC), Erin Elizabeth Smith (Oak Ridge, TN), Junious Ward (Charlotte, NC), and Joaquín Zihuatanejo (Dallas, TX).
This is the project the Altadena Poets Laureate have planned for our community.
Peter J. Harris and Carla Rachel Sameth, Poet Laureate Fellows, Altadena, California Peter J. Harris’s and Carla Rachel Sameth’s project, “Ode to the Land,” will pair senior citizens and high school students for poetry workshops and create a public poetry reading series focused on place, home, and odes to iconic natural and cultural settings in Altadena, CA, an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County. The workshops will feature guest poets and performing artists who have expertise in presenting the ode as well as other lyric and narrative forms of praise poetry. The readings will be live streamed from various locations, including the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy site, Zorthian Ranch, Charles White Park, and the Eaton Canyon Natural Area and Nature Center.
Harris is the author of several collections, including Safe Arms: 20 Love & Erotic Poems (FlowerSong Press, 2022) and Bless the Ashes (Tia Chucha Press, 2014), which won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award. His book of essays, The Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ won the American Book Award. The founding director of The Black Man of Happiness Project, he is a 2023 artist in residence at The Nicholson Project in Washington, D.C.
Sameth is the author of a debut full-length collection, Secondary Inspections (Nymeria Publishing, 2023), which is forthcoming in November; the chapbook What Is Left (dancing girl press, 2021); and the memoir One Day on the Gold Line (originally published by Black Rose Writing, 2019; reissued by Golden Foothills Press, 2022). She teaches creative writing with the Los Angeles Writing Project and at Southern New Hampshire University. She was selected to be a 2019–23 “Pride Poet” for the City of West Hollywood’s One City One Pride LGBTQ Arts Festival.
For more information about the Altadena Poets Laureate, at altadenalibrary.org/poetry.
About the Academy of American Poets
Founded in 1934, the Academy of American Poets is the United States’ leading champion of poets and poetry with supporters in all fifty states and beyond. The organization annually awards $1.3+ million to more than two hundred poets at various stages of their careers through its prize program, which includes the Poet Laureate Fellowships. The organization also produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; established and organizes National Poetry Month each April; publishes the popular Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides free resources to K–12 educators, including the award-winning weekly Teach This Poem series; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition that promotes the value poets bring to our culture. To learn more about the Academy of American Poets, including its staff, its Board of Directors, and its Board of Chancellors, visit: https://poets.org.
About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through its grants, the Mellon Foundation seeks to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.