Tracy K. Smith

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Tracy K. Smith (born April 16, 1972) is an American poet and educator.

She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019.

She has published four collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars.In April 2018, she was nominated for a second term as United States Poet Laureate by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.

Early life

Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she was raised in Fairfield, California, in a family with "deep roots" in Alabama. Her mother was a teacher and her father an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Her book Life on Mars pays homage to her father's life and work.  Smith became interested in writing and poetry early, reading Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain in elementary school; Dickinson's poems, in particular, struck Smith as working like "magic," she wrote in her memoir Ordinary Light, with the rhyme and meter making Dickinson's verses feel almost impossible not to commit to memory. Smith then composed a short poem entitled "Humor" and showed it to her fifth-grade teacher, who encouraged her to keep writing. The work of Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Rita Dove also became significant influences.

Smith received her A.B. from Harvard University, where she studied with Helen Vendler, Lucie Brock-Broido, Henri Cole and Seamus Heaney. While in Cambridge, Smith joined the Dark Room Collective. She graduated in 1994, then earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University in 1997. From 1997 to 1999, she was a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University.

Personal life

Smith lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Raphael Allison, and their three children. Allison is the author of Bodies on the Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading. University of Iowa Press. 2014.. The family previously lived in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

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Career

Smith has taught at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University. She served as the 2014 Robert Frost Chair of Literature at Middlebury College in 2011, 2012, and 2014.

She joined Princeton University's faculty in 2006, where she was named a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor of Humanities. She became Chair of Princeton's Lewis Center for the Performing Arts on July 1, 2019.

Smith was a judge for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Smith curated The Slowdown, a podcast and radio show from 2018 to 2020.

Smith joined Harvard University's English and African American Studies departments in 2021. Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

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Awards, grants, fellowships

• Grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.
• Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
• Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
• Cave Canem Prize (2002) for The Body's Question. This award honors the best first book by an African-American poet; Smith's book was chosen by Kevin Young.
• Whiting Award in 2005 for poetry. This award is for emerging writers.
• James Laughlin Award in 2006 for Duende. This award from the Academy of American Poets honors the best second volume of a poet published in the US.
• Essence magazine's Literary Award in 2008 for Duende. The award honors the best African-American literature.
• Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative in 2010. Hans Magnus Enzensberger became Smith's mentor for one year as part of this program; their experience worked together was described in a short article by Philip Dodd.
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2012 for Life on Mars (Graywolf Press), "a collection of bold, skillful poems, taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and pain."
• Academy Fellowship in 2014 given by the Academy of American Poets to recognize distinguished poetic achievement.
• 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction shortlist for Ordinary Light
• 2016 Robert Creeley Award
• 2018 American Ingenuity Award for Education