A bench dedication ceremony was held for Ada Limón, a two-time poet laureate of the United States and a recent recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, in front of Readers’ Books on August 18, 2023. 

Limón was the first employee of Readers’ Books when it opened in 1991. She was 15 at the time and later, she worked on and off at the store during college breaks. Now, as a poet known throughout the United States, she returned to the bookstore where the first monument in the plaza dedicated to a woman was established in her honor.  

Among the speakers at the bench dedication ceremony was a representative for Senator Dodd, who planned to be there but unfortunately was ill. Along with him was our very own Ms. Manchester, English teacher, Student Voice Victoria Hernandez-Padilla, Sonoma County Supervisor for District 1 Rebecca Hermosillo, and Mayor Sandra Lowe. 

Mayor Lowe said in her speech that she was very excited to introduce architecture on the Plaza that was dedicated to something other than “war and wine” but instead “words.” 

Furthermore, Ms. Manchester recalled Limón’s visit to SVHS during the 2023 Authors Festival in which her impact far extended beyond the usual crowd of avid readers. After her speech, there were “students you would never guess to be holding a poetry book standing in line to get her autograph.” Students are reading poems that mention familiar places like “Arnold Drive, Moon Mountain, and Sebastiani Theater.” 

As 2023 Youth of the Year, Student Voice Victoria Hernandez-Padilla was chosen to read one of Limón’s poems. She read “How We See Each Other” from Limón’s latest book The Hurting Kind. 

The bench, unveiled by Limón is engraved with a quote from the poem “The Conditional” which she read to the audience from her book Bright Dead Things. The engraving reads “Say you’d still want this: us alive, right here, feeling lucky.”

Taking the podium, the poet laureate shared that it is “surreal” to be back home for the dedication, remembering how she used to “look at the different types of oak leaves outside of [her] classroom window at Dunbar Elementary School” where she lived largely in her own imagination. However, she shares, that despite her aspirations she “doesn’t think [she] could have dreamt” of a bench dedicated to her outside of the “beloved bookstore” where she used to work.

Another notable poet, Jane Hirshfield, recently spoke at Readers’ Books. She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985. Hirshfield did a reading of her latest book, The Asking: New and Selected Poems, which consists of poems she wrote from ages 18 to 70. 

The acclaimed poet shared that she tries to begin every year by writing a poem, but that she felt she was in a “weird limbo” on January 1st, 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic, recent presidential election, and January 6th riots had affected her creative process.

Hirshfield is an outspoken political activist, and on top of sending postcards to swing states in the 2020 election she had a political poem go viral after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. It was an “all purpose crisis poem” written from the “viewpoint of the future looking at us.” She hopes that future readers will read of her fears in a more just and environmentally conscious world and wonder “why she was so worried.” She also spoke in front of roughly 50,000 people at the first March for Science in 2017. 

Not only a poet but a philanthropist as well, Hirshfield appreciates the small beauties of life. She stated that somewhere in the world “someone is writing a beautiful poem” that will “never be published,” but the “air we breathe is changed” because they have been written.