The Academy’s Poet Laureate Fellowship program, now in its seventh year, will fund fellows’ community projects that put poetry at the center of individual and collective experiences
New York, NY – Yesterday, July 31, 2025 the Academy of American Poets, a leading financial supporter of poets in the United States, announced that it will award $50,000 fellowships to twenty-three poets laureate serving in cities and states across the nation. These fellowships recognize poets laureate for their literary excellence while enabling them to undertake impactful and timely projects that engage their communities through the transformative power of poetry. In addition, the Academy will provide more than $95,000 total in matching grants to twenty-one local 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations collaborating with the 2025 fellows on their work.
“The Academy of American Poets is jazzed to champion wide-ranging poetry projects produced by poets laureate in big cities and small towns alike—all across the country—spanning poetry festivals, anthologies, nooks, and cookbooks to toll-free poetry hotlines, prison workshops, public beach readings, and billboards,” said Tess O’Dwyer, Board Chair of the Academy. “At a time when more readers are turning to poetry to make sense of the world around us, American poets are beacons of free expression, cultural insight, and civic engagement.”
Since 2019, the Academy’s Poet Laureate Fellowship program, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation, has seeded the creation of new laureateship positions across the U.S., with more than forty laureate positions established since the program’s inception. In total, the Academy has awarded $7.65 million in fellowships to 149 poets laureate, plus more than $540,000 in matching grants to secure project support from seventy-nine local 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. Throughout the years, fellows’ programs have reached millions of community members and have included: a series of poetry workshops held in prisons and jails in Louisiana; a monthlong poetry festival co-organized with more than twenty community partners in St. Petersburg, FL; poetry readings during National Suicide Prevention Month and a cookbook project connecting poets and chefs in Kansas; a poetry anthology celebrating salmon runs and poets in Washington State; a statewide billboard campaign in Michigan; the creation of new Youth Poet Laureate positions in Lake County, CA, and Milwaukee, WI; and a toll-free poetry hotline for residents of Philadelphia. (Click here for full press release of the Academy of American Poets)
The 2025 Poet Laureate Fellows and the communities they serve are Kweku Abimbola (El Segundo, CA), Mateo Acuña (Auburn, WA), Tommy Archuleta (Santa Fe, NM), Esther Belin (Durango, CO), Colin Channer (Rhode Island), Jen Cheng (West Hollywood, CA), Steven Espada Dawson (Madison, WI), Mag Gabbert (Dallas, TX), Nancy Miller Gomez (Santa Cruz County, CA), Salaam Green (Birmingham, AL), Lester Graves Lennon and Sehba Sarwar (Altadena, CA), Jennifer Militello (New Hampshire), jessica Care moore (Detroit, MI), Caridad Moro-Gronlier (Miami, FL), Jennifer Polson Peterson (Hattiesburg, MS), Poetic X (Caddo Parish, LA), Jewel Rodgers (Nebraska), Mattie Quesenberry Smith (Virginia), Ruelaine Stokes (Lansing, MI), Bianca Stone (Vermont), Dujie Tahat (Seattle, WA), and Raffi Joe Wartanian (Glendale, CA).
Mag Gabbert, Poet Laureate Fellow of Dallas, Texas
Mag Gabbert will launch the Dallas “Sidewalk Poetry Project,” a poetry-centered public art installation that commemorates the historical significance of twenty-eight locations throughout the city of Dallas and provides opportunities for all Dallas residents to participate. Through the project, poems written by Dallas residents will be stamped into freshly poured sidewalks all across town using an accessible, new, Dallas-centric poetry form invented by Gabbert, called the “2-1-Form.” Each featured installation location will be chosen with a focus on equity and inclusion, and with the intention of addressing and healing past instances of harmful erasure. Gabbert will also work with the city's Office of Arts and Culture to create a website that houses an informational video, instructions for residents to submit their work for consideration, and supplemental educational resources.
Gabbert is the author of the full-length collection Sex Depression Animals (Mad Creek Books, 2023), which won the Charles B. Wheeler Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of the chapbook The Breakup (Action, Spectacle, 2023), which won the Baltic Writing Residency Chapbook Prize. Gabbert’s other awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 92NY Discovery Award, and fellowships from The Kenyon Review and Idyllwild Arts. She teaches at Southern Methodist University.
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