Writing takes time — including, as every writer knows, time away from writing. And time takes money. So the job of Vermont poet laureate could be said to be a giant paradox: an unpaid, four-year appointment by the governor to do one of the most intensive kinds of writing, while also bringing poetry to the public.
Bianca Stone, who became the state’s 10th poet laureate last year, just landed a cushion: She won a $50,000 laureate fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the award is competitive; state and city poets laureate, of whom there are at least 80 nationwide, must submit an application detailing their achievements and a community project proposal. Stone was one of 23 winners this year.
“The money is partly for the project and partly for you to do your work,” Stone, 41, said by phone from her home in Brandon. The author of several collections, including What Is Otherwise Infinite, which won a 2022 Vermont Book Award, Stone has also edited a collection of her grandmother Ruth Stone’s poems — Vermont’s poet laureate from 2007 to 2011 — and illustrated Anne Carson’s Antigonick, a translation of Sophocles’ Antigone. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Nation, Poets & Writers and elsewhere.
The financial award is crucial, Stone said: “To support [poets] financially in any way they need to do their writing, unimpeded, with intentional leisure time in order to create, makes the biggest impact on supporting and nurturing poetry.”
The project Stone will pursue with the award funding is focused on the work of other poets. Starting in January, she’ll travel each month for a year to towns around the state to read and discuss poems by former Vermont poets laureate. Her predecessors comprise an “incredible list,” she said, including the first, Robert Frost (1961 to 1963); and the second, Galway Kinnell (1989 to 1993, after governor Madeleine Kunin revived the tradition). Stone also called out Louise Glück (1994 to 1998); the inimitable Grace Paley (2003 to 2007); and Mary Ruefle (2019 to 2024), a favorite.
At each event, Stone also hopes to involve local poets, who will join her for workshops before the readings and onstage for talks.
Asked if she would read any of her own poetry, Stone, sounding surprised, said, “I don’t know. I probably should, shouldn’t I?”
Stone is visiting faculty at Dartmouth College and the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, and she gives workshops and readings around the state. She is creative director of the Ruth Stone House in Goshen, a literary nonprofit that hosts writing retreats, a letterpress studio, and events such as Beer and Broadsides, where anyone can come and read a poem aloud on the porch.
The laureate project will mean more time away from writing, but, she said, “I love the idea of having the opportunity to read [former poets laureates’] work to people.” Each talk will reflect the poems’ relevance to a current-day issue, such as the divisiveness of the political climate or humans’ relation to the natural world.
She also hopes to hold public workshops, in which participants will engage with poetry through writing prompts. Some of the poems and prompts will appear in a chapbook that Stone, an aficionado of small-press and letterpress printing, hopes to produce. She plans to announce her schedule of appearances in December on social media.
Her aim is not just to bring past laureates’ work to light but also to create community.
“I think the function of poetry is that it helps us feel more seen by one another,” Stone said. “We understand one another in our differences when we read poetry. There aren’t many instances to contain and hold that space for differences, for ambivalences,” she observed.
Poetry, she continued, also “brings us into right relation” with nature. “I think these past Vermont poets had a really specific relationship to the landscape here, so I feel their work is very important right now.” And, she added, “I wanted to celebrate Vermont and what it has meant to poets.”
Excerpt from “What’s Poetry Like?”
… something with lungs
and no face, the immortal freak
of language you haunt and hunt
which is the original state of language
you’re trying to get back to from within
Originally published in the New Yorker, August 21, 2023
The original print version of this article was headlined “Bianca Stone Wins Fellowship From the Academy of American Poets”
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2025.
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