Stanford Humanities Center
The Academy of American Poets announced that it will award $50,000 each to twenty-two poets serving as poets laureate in cities, counties, states, and Tribal communities across the United States. In addition, the Academy will provide a total of $81,000 in matching grants to fourteen local 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations collaborating with laureates on their work.
Antonio De Jesús López’s project, “One County Under Bars,” brings poetry into the places where it is likely kept out—the jails of San Mateo County. As poet laureate, De Jesús López leads trauma-informed writing workshops inside Maple Street Correctional Center, in partnership with the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office. The workshops offer a space for participants to write, to be heard, and to reclaim authorship over their own stories. The project culminates in a published anthology with Paloma Press, entering participants’ voices into the county’s permanent cultural record. Through the fellowship, De Jesús López will support participants’ writing as they move to reenter society and bring the anthology to print. Its publication will be accompanied by public readings that will seek to return these voices to the community.
De Jesús López was a Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Humanities Center during the 2025–26 academic year.
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