In 2024, Genny Lim was appointed the ninth poet laureate of San Francisco.
“It is truly a great honor to have been selected as the first Chinese American to serve as San Francisco Poet Laureate. My appointment comes with a sense of profound pride. Growing up in postwar San Francisco Chinatown, as the seventh child of Chinese immigrants once detained at the Angel Island Immigration Detention Center, I have an acute awareness of city residents who function dually as both insiders and outsiders,” said Poet Laureate Genny Lim. “This is the city where people, such as my immigrant parents, come to dream, explore and reinvent themselves. My vision is to help reinvigorate the city through the healing vehicle of poetry. Poetry is a way to better understand the world.”
The Living Poets Society
In 2025, Genny Lim helped to inaugurate San Francisco’s first youth poet laureate cohort program with San Francisco Public Library, Youth Speaks, and 826 Valencia. She curates the Living Poets Society Reading Series throughout the city’s branch libraries. The series highlights poets from the first Youth Poet Laureates Cohort of San Francisco, in an intergenerational presentation with established local poets.
Words Without Walls
In 2026, Genny Lim was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her special project, “Words Without Walls,” a multi-generational, community-building project, explores cross-disciplinary responses to poetry. Participants will discover how the languages of the arts can help free the written word beyond the page in six workshops that will culminate in a performance at the San Francisco Main Public Library featuring Lim, intergenerational poets, and collaborating artists.
The program is made possible by the generous support of the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation.
Music Without Walls: San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 8
Forthcoming in April 2027, Music Without Walls, a new collection of poetry by San Francisco’s Poet Laureate Genny Lim published by City Lights, offers an impassioned insider’s personal homage to America’s indigenous music, jazz.