Announcing COMmon Read!

COMmon Read is returning in August 2024!

• Who: You, everyone at COM, and Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States
• What: COM's shared reading program featuring poetry by Ada Limón
• Where: All over both campuses and the community. Stay tuned for related events
• When: August 2024 - May 2025
• Why poetry? Why now? Poetry helps us process complex feelings and experiences, and it teaches empathy. 

Join us for a year-long celebration of reading! This year's COMmon Read will focus on poetry by Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States. The library is purchasing copies of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World and The Hurting Kind to be used by faculty to teach and given freely to students across the college. 

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and a TIME magazine Woman of the Year. As the Poet Laureate, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. 

“I want to champion the ways reading and writing poetry can situate us in the natural world. Never has it been more urgent to feel a sense of reciprocity with our environment, and poetry's alchemical mix of attention, silence, and rhythm gives us a  reciprocal way of experiencing nature—of communing with the natural world through breath and presence.” -U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón

Learn more about COMmon Read
and find copies of the books, online or in print!

Photograph by Lucas Marquardt