U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, Winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and author of “The Carrying,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, visited Edwardsville for the first time to present her poetry at SIUE and be interviewed by SIUE professor Lauren Gerber and EHS English teacher, Kirk Schlueter.

With 10 months to plan, Gerber and Schlueter researched Limón’s works and interview history, and strived to come up with different, new and engaging questions.

“She’s an incredibly popular poet,” Schlueter said. “She’s interviewed all the time, and we’re sure she gets the same three questions every time. Our goal was we had ten questions and wanted to make as many of them as possible something that we felt like she probably hadn’t been asked before.”

According to English teacher Cara Lane, who helped coordinate the event, Gerber and Schlueter used their knowledge of poetry, as poets themselves, to derive some of their questions.

“They know that maybe your average journalist or host, it’s not going to occur to them to ask some of the questions that they did,” Lane said. “They were very intentional about those and I think that showed in her responses because she was pleased to be asked some of those questions.”

Lane acknowledged that there was a lot of pressure for this once-in-a-lifetime event to be successful.

“Not only did I want things to go well from our esteemed guest’s perspective, but we had an audience to take care of,” Lane said. “I was inviting my students, I had invited members of the community, and just like in any show, you want to be able to run it and run it well so nobody is let down.”

During the event, Limón introduced some of the projects she’s been working on, such as her poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem For Europa,” which will be engraved in her own handwriting on NASA’s Europa Clipper vessel, kicking off NASA’s “Message In A Bottle Campaign.”

“I’m interested in what it is for a poem to reach someone,” Limón said in the interview. “If we’re going to write poems, why not make them offerings?”

Limón also described how her experience growing up as a woman of color influenced her love of nature and the themes of her poems.

“[When asked where I’m from] as a small child, I wanted to say I am from the trees, I am from the rocks, I am from the creeks, I am from the stars,” Limón said. “It’s my way of belonging. [Nature is] a place for living things and I am a living thing and therefore I belong.”

Despite the pressures both Lane and Schlueter were under, both considered the night to be extremely rewarding and successful.

“It’s a buzz of joy. Even talking about it now, days later,” Schlueter said. “I think it’s always going to be something that I can’t quite believe I was a part of, but I’m really happy and grateful that I got the chance to do so.”

Lane shared this enthusiasm, proud to know the amount of students who left the event feeling inspired.

“What a beautiful opportunity to be a part of something that offered such a rich experience for so many people in so many different ways,” Lane said. “It’s amazing what positive events happen when a library is involved.”