Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith (born April 16, 1972, Falmouth, Massachusetts, U.S.) American poet and author whose writing often confronts formidable themes of loss and grief, nascent adulthood, and the roles of race and family through references to pop culture and precise descriptions of intimate moments.

Smith, born the youngest of five children in Massachusetts, grew up near Travis Air Force Base in northern California, where her father, who later worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, was stationed. Both her father and her mother, a former teacher, would feature prominently in Smith’s later writing. A bookish child, she did well in school, and her teachers encouraged her to write at an early age. Smith pursued a degree in English and American literature and Afro-American studies at Harvard University (B.A., 1994) and went on to study creative writing at Columbia University (M.F.A., 1997). After graduating, she was a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University from 1997 to 1999.

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Smith’s first collections of poetry—The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), and Life on Mars (2011)—were well received. Her work languidly and skillfully shifts from expansive issues to everyday occurrences, imbuing the ordinary with significance and providing a place for the incomprehensible in everyday life. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Life on Mars. The futuristic poems in that collection invoke a mixture of sorrow and delight as they consider humans’ place in the universe, grieve her father’s death in 2008, comment on contemporary headlines, and voice the everyday frustrations of having noisy neighbours. Smith also authored a memoir, Ordinary Light (2015), which explores the making of her identity, including her growing awareness as an adolescent of her Black heritage and the death of her mother from cancer when Smith was 22. Her fourth collection of poetry, Wade in the Water (2018), contemplates issues of class, climate, and slavery, occasionally through the voices of others, notably in the poem “I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It,” which incorporates letters of Black soldiers enlisted in the American Civil War. Her fifth collection, Such Color (2021), features a selection of earlier poems as well as new ones, several of which confront historical and present-day racism in the United States.

Before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 2005, Smith taught at the City University of New York, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University. She became the director of Princeton’s writing program in 2015 and the chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts in 2019. In 2021 she joined the Harvard faculty as a professor of English and of African and African American studies. Smith was named the 22nd poet laureate of the United States in 2017, and she served until 2019. In addition, she hosted (2018–20) the podcast The Slowdown, in each episode of which she read and briefly discussed a selected poem.