Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, and translator. Smith served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019, where she spearheaded American Conversations: Celebrating Poems in Rural Communities with the Library of Congress, launched the American Public Media Podcast "The Slowdown," and edited the anthology "American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time."

Smith is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir and National Book Award Finalist Ordinary Light, which Booklist calls “a gracefully nuanced yet strikingly candid memoir about family, faith, race, and literature” and praises Smith for her ability to “hold our intellectual and emotional attention ever so tightly as she charts her evolving thoughts on the divides between races, generations, economic classes, religion and science and celebrates her lifesaving discovery of poetry as ‘soul language.’"

In 2012, Smith received the Pulitzer Prize for Life on Mars and was selected as a New York Times Notable. Her poems embody the lyrical, rhythmic quality of masters such as Federico Garcí¬a Lorca. At times political, whimsical, and always meditative, they speak largely to the role of art and the conception of what it means to be American, dealing with the “evolution and decline of the culture we belong to.” Her work also explores the dichotomy between the ordered world and the irrationality of the self, the importance of submitting oneself willingly to the “ongoing conflict” of life and surviving nonetheless—or, as in Smith’s own words, “poetry is a way of stepping into the mess of experience.” Additional works of Smith include "The Body’s Question," winner of the Cave Canem prize; "Duende," winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essence Literary Award; "Wade in the Water," and "To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul."

She formerly served as the Director of Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and taught at Columbia, City University of New York, and the University of Pittsburgh. Smith is a professor of English and African-American Studies at Harvard University. Smith completed her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, earning her MFA at Columbia before becoming a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.