Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. She studied at Harvard University, where she joined the Dark Room Collective, a reading series for writers of color, created by Sharan Strange in 1988. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University.

Smith is the author of five poetry collections: Such Color: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf, 2021), which was awarded the 2022 New England Book Award in Poetry; Wade in the Water (Graywolf, 2018), winner of the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry and short-listed for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize; Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Duende (Graywolf, 2007), winner of the 2006 James Laughlin Award; and The Body’s Question (Graywolf, 2003), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2002. She is the editor of the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018). 

Smith is also the author of the memoirs To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023) and Ordinary Light (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015).

A starred review of Smith’s work in Publisher’s Weekly noted her “lyric brilliance and political impulses.” A review of The Body’s Question in The New York Times Book Review stated,

The most persuasively haunted poems here are those where [Smith] casts herself not simply as a dutiful curator of personal history but a canny medium of fellow feeling and the stirrings of the collective unconscious ... it’s this charged air of rapt apprehension that gives her spare, fluid lines their coolly incantatory tenor.

Smith is the recipient of the 2014 Academy of American Poets Fellowship. About Smith, Academy of American Poets Chancellor Toi Derricotte said:

The surfaces of a Tracy K. Smith poem are beautiful and serene, but underneath, there is always a sense of an unknown vastness. Her poems take the risk of inviting us to imagine, as the poet does, what it is to travel in another person’s shoes. The Academy is fortunate to be able to confer this fitting recognition on one of the most important poets of our time.

Smith served as the twenty-second poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. Her other awards and honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award, a 2005 Whiting Award, and a 2008 Essence Literary Award. In 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Smith was the Poem-a-Day Guest Editor for April 2019 and 2018, respectively. In 2021, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Smith is a professor of English and of African and African American studies at Harvard University, as well as the interim director of creative writing.