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MONTPELIER—The Academy of American Poets has named Bianca Stone, Vermont’s current Poet Laureate, as a 2025 Poet Laureate Fellow. Stone is among 23 poets selected from across the country for this high honor.
The 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, according to the Academy. Fellows are awarded $50,000. The program is funded by the Mellon Foundation.
For her project, Stone will launch “The State of Poetry,” a traveling community-building initiative with events across Vermont through 2026. Each event will feature leaders of the local literary arts community, a writing workshop, and a public reading and/or public craft talk that will be open to the public. These events will be centered around a chapbook publication to include selected poems from previous Vermont poets laureate and corresponding writing prompts for youth and adults. The craft talks will focus on poems written by past Vermont poets laureate that illuminate and speak to the critical current climate. The events will underscore how poems and poets are vital to our state, connecting community members to the changing landscape, architecture, wildlife, and to each other.
“I'm excited to really get deep into some of the poetry of my predecessors and to bring really incredible poetry to people, in a room together, to really embody those poems, and speak to what happens when we do that. Every time I have a chance to read poems and talk about them with people in Vermont, something really exciting happens, and it's like an energy in the room,” Stone said.
Of the poetry of the past poet laureates that Stone’s project will emphasize, she said, “To engage with these poems does something really subtle and important to our consciousness and conscious. This is a time when we need to find voice to our complex and difficult feelings and realities. Poems are so important to our ‘state,’ right now, because we need to see one another, and we each need to feel seen. And we need most of all to see ourselves.”
Of the award, Stone reflected, “You can tell the wellbeing of a society by its treatment of poetry. This is an honor I think mostly because of my own writing, my own poetry. I'm devoted to talking about poetry, but the real work for me is writing it. This honor means I am being supported for this work, this life. It means I should keep doing exactly what I'm doing, while I can. I am so grateful for it.”
“We’re thrilled that Bianca has been chosen as an Academy Fellow,” said Vermont Arts Council Executive Director Susan Evans McClure. "Poetry has the power to increase empathy and provide new perspectives on the human experience. Bianca’s project will help to connect neighbors in communities across Vermont, which is especially important at this time when connection and understanding is so needed.”
Stone was appointed Vermont Poet Laureate by Governor Phil Scott in 2024 after a nomination process managed by the Vermont Arts Council. The appointment is a four-year term.
Stone is the author of several poetry collections, including “The Near and Distant World,” forthcoming in January 2026 from Tin House, and “What Is Otherwise Infinite” (Tin House, 2022), winner of the 2023 Vermont Book Award. She also collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of “Antigonick” (New Directions, 2012), Carson’s translation of Sophocles’s “Antigone.” Stone teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at Dartmouth College, Bennington College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Ruth Stone House in Goshen, VT. She hosts the “Ode & Psyche” podcast.
For more information about the Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, visit https://poets.org/academy-american-poets-awards-1-million-total-23-poet-laureate-fellows-across-united-states
For more information about the Vermont Poet Laureate, visit https://www.vermontartscouncil.org/programs/vermont-poet-laureate/
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