Miami's Poet Laureate Wins $50,000 Award to Fund Her Project With O, Miami

On Thursday, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, already named the Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade in 2024, received another prestigious award when she was recognized as one of the Academy of American Poets' 2025 Poet Laureate Fellows. Moro-Gronlier was one of 23 recipients to earn a $50,000 fellowship from the organization.

According to a statement by the Academy, "These fellowships recognize poets laureate for their literary excellence while enabling them to undertake impactful and timely projects that engage their communities through the transformative power of poetry."

"It was a rigorous application that is meant to be used to promote civic poetry," Moro-Gronlier tells New Times, and the poet is already hard at work on "Generation 305: An Intergenerational Poetry Project," which the fellowship will help fund.

"The idea is to create intergenerational poetry through seniors who are passing away," she explains. "We pair a poet with a subject and preserve their story by forming a connection. So many of us are immigrants or children of immigrants. It's important to preserve these cultures. When my abuela goes, so does her arroz con pollo recipe if we don't write it down."

Generation 305 will collaborate with local libraries, public schools, and the Miami Book Fair to organize multigenerational poetry workshops to preserve seniors' stories. The poems will be displayed as public art, and Moro-Gronlier will document the project to create a digital archive.

As poetry curator-at-large for the Betsy Hotel's Writer's Room, Moro-Gronlier says she's already enlisted visiting poets in Generation 305. "I'm making sure that every poet who enters the room writes a Generation 305 poem," she says.

She's already seen collaborations break down barriers within Miami's poetry community. "This has been a great opportunity to engage with other poets," she adds. "I finally get to break bread with people I've known of but didn't get to know, like the Biscayne Poet. It has really been lovely."

Beyond that project, Moro-Gronlier also has a new volume of poetry, Through the Lens, published by Texas Review Press, to be released in 2026. "Each poem is a response to a form of art or a place, like Vizcaya. One is even a response to a Dunkin Donuts commercial."

Moro-Gronlier shares one of the poems she'll include in the book with New Times readers:

Macho as Object, as Still Life, as Portrait

The way he bares
his brunette chest
seems geared to impress
with all he reveals,
but beneath my stare
his bold undress
guards the skin
he keeps concealed.

I want to know
the rooted scar
beneath the rose
ink bloom,
raise the guardrail
of his arm
his shielded gaze
exhume.