On July 12, 2022, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Ada Limón as the 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Limón began her first term as laureate on September 1, 2022, and on September 29 gave her inaugural reading in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium.

The following video, filmed ahead of the official announcement of Limón's appointment, features her in discussion with the Library's Chief Communications Officer, Roswell Encina, in the Poetry Room (the laureate's "official" office) and reading her poem “The End of Poetry.”

During her first term Limón has participated in two events hosted by the first lady of the United States, for the National Student Poets Program and for the State Visit with Brigette Macron, wife of the president of France. She has also participated in an event hosted by Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller, wife of the president of Mexico, for the North American Leaders Summit in Mexico City, and in Buenos Aires she participated in a conversation with Argentine poets Laura Wittner and Daniela Auginsky for the Library’s Palabra Archive.

In a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the Academy of American Poets, Limón served as the April 2023 National Poetry Month guest editor for the Academy's Poem-a-Day series External. In an interview with the Academy External, Limón said of the twenty poems she selected for the series:

I wanted poems that felt like they had a life to them; that they were expansive in some way; that they were reaching out towards a reader, whether that reader was one intimate person or a larger readership. I wanted them to feel like they were vibrating. I think of April as an alive month, when we come back to life in some ways. And so I wanted these poems to perform a little resurrection, I think.

On April 24, 2023, Limón’s was appointed to a second, two-year term as laureate. Her term began in September 2023 and concludes in April 2025. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said:

During her first term, Ada Limón has done so much to broaden and promote poetry to reach new audiences. She also laid the groundwork for multiple laureate outreach efforts to come, many with federal agencies. A two-year second term gives the laureate and the Library the opportunity to realize these efforts and showcase how poems connect to, and make sense of, the world around us.

To this end, Limón has a number of major collaborations under way to share more poetry with the public. On January 30, 2022, the Library announced that Limón was in the process of writing a new poem dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. On June 1, she returned to the Library to reveal the new poem she has written for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa." Limón’s poem will be engraved on the spacecraft that will travel 1.8 billion miles to explore Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. The poem is part of an ongoing NASA campaign, “Message in a Bottle External ," which invites people around the world to sign their names to the poem.

Since the poet laureateship was created by an act of Congress in 1985, nearly half of the laureates have taken on a signature project to raise the national appreciation of poetry. In a July 12, 2022, NPR interview External Limón offered preliminary thoughts on what she'd hoped her project would accomplish:

The intention I have around building a project is to see if I can do something that helps us not only reconnect with our humanity but helps us repair our relationship with the natural world. I think so often we forget that our relationship to the Earth is reciprocal. And I think we've not only felt very disconnected from one another, from our communities, but also from the planet, and that's how harm is done. And so I think that I would really love to figure out how, you know, through poetry we might be able to repair that relationship with the Earth, with nature.

On September 6, 2023, Limón announced her signature project, "You Are Here.” The project will feature two major new initiatives: an anthology of commissioned nature poems and poetry installed as public art in seven national parks.

The anthology, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, will be published by Milkweed Editions in association with the Library of Congress on April 2. It will feature original poems by 50 contemporary American poets, including former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.

“You Are Here: Poetry in Parks,” an initiative with the National Park Service and the Poetry Society of America, will feature site-specific poetry installations in seven national parks across the country. These installations, which will transform picnic tables into works of public art, will each feature a historic American poem that connects in a meaningful way to the park and will “encourage visitors to pay deeper attention to their surroundings,” according to Limón.

Participating national parks are:

• Cape Cod National Seashore (Massachusetts)
• Cuyahoga Valley National Park (Ohio)
• Great Smoky Mountains National Park (North Carolina and Tennessee)
• Everglades National Park (Florida)
• Mount Rainier National Park (Washington)
• Redwood National and State Parks (California)
• Saguaro National Park (Arizona)

Limón will travel to each of the participating parks in the summer and fall of 2024 to unveil and celebrate the new installations and support community outreach.

Commenting on Limón's project, Dr. Hayden said:

In this moment when the natural world is making headlines, Ada Limón’s signature project will help us connect more personally to America’s greatest parks as well as show how the poets of our time capture the natural world in their own lives. “t also extends our laureate’s engagement with federal agencies and literary partners, to promote poetry to the nation.”

In November 2023, Limón published a commissioned poem titled "Startlement External" for the recently released Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5). In February 2024, she was named one of TIME magazine's "Women of the Year" for 2024.

On April 17, 2025, Limón concludes her historic two-term, three-year appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate with a  lecture titled “Against Breaking: On the Public & Private Power of Poetry External.”