Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith earned degrees from Harvard University (B.A.) and Columbia University (M.F.A.). She currently serves as a professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard University and as the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

"Poetry is a living language. Poetry is language that insists upon a visceral and immediate engagement with the reader. Poems are tools that allow the words and the lived experience of others who are real or imagined to enter into the mouth and the ear and the body of a reader, and they create in us an appetite for the real…[T]hey create in us a desire to listen to and to be taught by others, to acknowledge there’s value and expertise in the embodied experience of other humans, no matter who they are."

— Excerpt from Oral Memoirs of Tracy K. Smith,
Baylor University Institute for Oral History

Smith’s most recent collection of poems is Such Color: New and Selected Poems (2021). Her other books of poetry are Wade in the Water (2018), Life on Mars (2011), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Duende (2007), and The Body’s Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She also is the author of the nonfiction books To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (2023) and Ordinary Light (2015).

Smith served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. Her other awards and honors include the Essence Literary Award, the James Laughlin Award, the Rona Jaffe Award, the Whiting Award, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.