Spring into the Semester Community Reading Program: Home

Dickinson College students, staff, and faculty are invited to a community discussion of The Hurting Kind: Poems by 24^th United States Poet Laureate and 2023 Stellfox Recipient Ada Limón.

This event – small group discussions facilitated by Dickinson faculty, staff, and students – will be held in the Waidner-Spahr Library on Monday, January 30, 2023 from 5:00 until 6:30 p.m. in anticipation of Limón's visit to Dickinson in mid-February.

Please register to let us know that you plan to attend. This will allow us to determine the number of discussion facilitators necessary to make it a meaningful event in which all attendees can participate.

Ada Limón’s sixth and most recent poetry anthology, The Hurting Kind (2022) explores humanity and the natural world, binding beautifully crafted images of nature with the human experiences of grief, joy, loneliness, and connection. Limón’s language is accessible yet masterfully constructed, a credit to her “excellent ear for the rhythms of speech and the sounds of sentences” (The New York Times). Reviewers observed that the collected poems, written during the coronavirus pandemic, capture a universal sense of unsettledness but also hope and new beginnings.

Limón’s other poetry anthologies include The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and Bright Dead Things, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She also hosts the critically acclaimed poetry podcast The Slowdown.  Limón is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry, and became the first Latina Poet Laureate of the United States on July 12, 2022.

The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions)

About the Author: Ada Limón

Reviews of The Hurting Kind

Interviews with Ada Limón

The community reading program is designed to provide shared intellectual experiences, build community, and encourage dialogue and discussion on timely issues. It is an opportunity for the Dickinson community to come together at the beginning of the spring semester, when there are few broad community-centered programs already scheduled.

The Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholars and Writers Program brings major literary figures to campus for an inter-arts residency that may include readings, discussions, performances, a public lecture and an award ceremony. Throughout a week on campus, each honoree also meets informally with students and professors, sharing meals and offering advice and insight to aspiring writers.

The program is named in honor of the parents of esteemed English teacher Jean Louise Stellfox, a native of Shamokin, Pa. Jean was in her third year at Dickinson in 1959 when she met Robert Frost during the poet's visit to campus. She was inspired by that experience and made it her life’s work to instill a similar passion for literature in others. She went on to become an exacting and effective literature teacher with a long and notable career. Jean left Dickinson most of her $1.5 million estate to carry on her lifelong mission. The Stellfox Visiting Scholars and Writers Program was formed to fulfill that wish after her death in 2003.

This year's event is sponsored by the Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholars and Writers Program, and organized by faculty and staff from the Departments of Creative Writing and English and the Waidner-Spahr Library. 

For more information, contact Jessica Howard or Sheela Jane Menon.

• Robert Saviano
• Boubacar Boris Diop
• Naomi Shahib Nye
• John Patrick Shanley
• Edwidge Danticat
• Lorrie Moore
• Paul Muldoon
• David Henry Hwang
• Richard Russo
• Margaret Atwood
• Maxine Kumin
• Mario Vargas Llosa
• Edward Albee
• Rita Dove
• Ian McEwan