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.
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.