Design Matters with Debbie Millman

Ada Limón

Mar 23, 2026
Ada Limón, 24th U.S. Poet Laureate and award-winning poet, reflects on childhood between two homes and a fierce love of the natural world. She talks about poetry as a way to hold loss, joy, and mortality. She also discusses craft, public service as laureate, and how poems emerge from sound, memory, and strange small moments.
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ANECDOTE

Mouse Fred Bridged Two Households

  • Ada Limón carried a pet mouse named Fred between her parents' two homes as a child during their divorce.
  • Fred's portability let her maintain continuity and comfort while shuttling between her father's and mother's very different households.
ANECDOTE

Joint Custody Recast As Abundance

  • Ada Limón reframed her split childhood as expansion rather than a broken home and wrote the poem Joint Custody from that perspective.
  • The poem lists dual elements—two kitchens, two creeks—and concludes she now has two brains, one that misses where she's not and one that is relieved to be home.
INSIGHT

Form As A Container For Intimacy

  • Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle One Art taught Ada that craft and repetition can carry intimate emotion and surprise.
  • The poem revealed form as a made container, where parentheses and the final 'write it' admission fuse love and loss.
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