Detroit, Michigan – Jessica Care Moore, Detroit’s Poet Laureate, is one of 23 poets in the country to get a distinguished fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. The fellowship gives each winner $50,000 and is part of a $1.1 million national program that helps literary leaders who use poetry to help and inspire their communities.
The Poet Laureate Fellowship program is in its ninth year and wants to sponsor community-based projects that make poetry a part of everyday life. Moore sees this honor as both an acknowledgment and a starting point. She will utilize the money to start a literacy project in Detroit’s neighborhoods in cooperation with The LOVE Building.
Her project involves workshops with teaching artists that bring together people of different ages to share their stories. The initiative will also make an audio poetry chapbook with poems read by people from the area and big public murals made by student artists with help from local muralists.
“I am honored to be chosen as a poet laureate fellow this year,” said Jessica Moore care. “This grant enables me to c continue the work of expanding poetry in public spaces in Detroit & placing poems into the hands of the people – where poems belong.”
Moore is a strong voice in literature and culture with a career that has lasted for decades. Your Crown Shines, her next children’s book, is due out soon. She has also written several well-received poetry collections, such as We Want Our Bodies Back and The Alphabet Verses the Ghetto. The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and the Detroit Institute of Arts have given her prizes for her work.
City leaders quickly praised her work. Rochelle Riley, head of Detroit’s Arts, Culture, and Entrepreneurship office, praised Moore as a “force of nature and global icon.” Mayor Mike Duggan called the fellowship “a well-deserved honor” that will make Moore’s effect in the community even stronger.
This year’s fellowships also come with more than $95,000 in matching grants for nonprofit partners like The LOVE Building. This makes sure that local groups have the money they need to support the fellows’ creative work. The Academy’s objective is to give poets the tools they need to run programs that range from poetry festivals and cookbooks to hotlines and beach readings.
“The Academy of American Poets is jazzed to champion wide-ranging poetry projects produced by poets laureate in big cities and small towns alike—all across the country—spanning poetry festivals, anthologies, nooks, and cookbooks to toll-free poetry hotlines, prison workshops, public beach readings, and billboards,” said Tess O’Dwyer, Board Chair of the Academy. “At a time when more readers are turning to poetry to make sense of the world around us, American poets are beacons of free expression, cultural insight, and civic engagement.”
Since its launch in 2019, the fellowship program—funded by the Mellon Foundation—has invested more than $7.6 million in 149 poets laureate across the U.S., seeding new laureateships and supporting programs that have reached millions.
For Moore, the fellowship is more than an accolade—it’s a continuation of her lifelong mission: bringing poetry into the streets of Detroit, to be seen, heard, and felt by the people who live there.
You can learn more about the other 2025 Poet Laureate Fellows and their projects at poets.org/academy-american-poets-awards-1-million-total-23-poet-laureate-fellows-across-united-states.