Tracy K. Smith

Early life

Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, 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 B.A. 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.

Career

Smith has taught at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. She taught summer sessions at Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in 2011, 2012, and 2014 and was the 2014 Robert Frost Chair of Literature.

In 2006, she joined the faculty of Princeton University, where she was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities. On July 1, 2019, she became Chair of Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts.{{cite web |url= https://arts.princeton.edu/news/2018/03/tracy-k-smith-named-as-chair-of-lewis-center-for-the-arts/|title= Tracy K. Smith Named as Chair of Lewis Center for the Arts |access-date=7 July 2019

Smith was a judge for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize.

From 2018 to 2020, Smith hosted the podcast and radio program The Slowdown.

In 2021, Smith joined the faculty of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She was the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute In 2025, she was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, succeeding Jorie Graham.

Critical reception

In his review of Life on Mars, Troy Jollimore selects Smith's poem "My god, it's full of stars" as particularly strong, "making use of images from science and science fiction to articulate human desire and grief, as the speaker allows herself to imagine the universe:" ... sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time, Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke. So that I might be sitting now beside my father As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe For the first time in the winter of 1959. In his review of the collection, Joel Brouwer also quoted at length from this poem, writing that "for Smith the abyss seems as much a space of possibility as of oblivion:" Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone, That the others have come and gone — a momentary blip — When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic, Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding, ... Dan Chiasson writes of another aspect of the collection: "The issues of power and paternalism suggest the deep ways in which this is a book about race. Smith’s deadpan title is itself racially freighted: we can’t think about one set of fifties images of Martians and sci-fi comics, without conjuring another, of black kids in the segregated South. Those two image files are situated uncannily close to each other in the cultural cortex, but it took this book to connect them."

About The Body's Question, Lucie Brock-Broido writes: "How delightful it is to fall under the lucid and quite more than lovely spell of Tracy K. Smith's debut collection. Smith's work is deceptively plainspoken, but these are poems that are powerfully wrought, inspiring in all the clarity of their many gospel truths. The Body's Question announces a remarkable new voice, brilliantly bundled, ingeniously belted down."

Yusef Komunyakaa writes: "The Body's Question is an answer to pure passion, but the beauty is that the brain isn't divorced from the body. The strength of character in these marvelous poems delights and questions. Here's a voice that can weave beauty and terror into one breath, and the unguarded revelations are never verbal striptease."

"Tracy Smith speaks many different languages. Besides the Spanish that graces the 'Gospels' of her book's opening section, Smith also seems perfectly at home speaking of grief and loss, of lust and hunger, of joy and desire, which here often means the desire for desire, and a desire for language itself....She seems to speak in tongues, to speak about that thing even beyond language, answering 'The Body's Question' of her title," said Kevin Young.

About Smith's second book, Duende, Elizabeth Alexander writes: "Tracy K. Smith synthesizes the riches of many discursive and poetic traditions without regard to doctrine and with great technical rigor. Her poems are mysterious but utterly lucid and write a history that is sub-rosa yet fully within her vision. They are deeply satisfying and necessarily inconclusive. And they are pristinely beautiful without ever being precious.”

Smith has received praise throughout her books for her questions on relationships, identity and sexuality. Hilton Als of The New Yorker writes: "Part of the gorgeous struggle in Smith’s poetry is about how to understand and accept her twin selves: the black girl who was brought up to be a polite Christian and the woman who is willing to give herself over to unbridled sensation and desire."

Her book Ordinary Light: A Memoir, about race, faith and the dawning of her poetic vocation, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015.

Smith is writing the librettos for two operas, one about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses and their competing visions for New York City (a project with composer Judd Greenstein and video artist Joshua Frankel). The other, Castor and Patience with composer Gregory Spears, about slavery's legacy was premiered in 2022 by Cincinnati Opera.

Personal life

Smith lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Raphael Allison, and their three children.

Bibliography

Poetry collections

List of poems

Anthology contributions

• Poems, Poets, Poetry
• Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook
• State of the Union: 50 Political Poems
• When She Named Fire
• Efforts and Affection: Women Poets on Mentorship
• The McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets
• Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century
• The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry
• Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade
• Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website
• Poetry 30: Thirty-Something Thirty-Something American Poets

Anthologies (as editor)

• American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time. Graywolf Press. 2018. .

Translations

Non-fiction

Awards and honors

Honors including grants, fellowships

• Grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation
• Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
• 1997 Stegner Fellow
• 2004 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award
• 2010 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Hans Magnus Enzensberger became Smith's mentor for one year; their experience working together was described in an article by Philip Dodd.
• 2014 Academy Fellowship given by the Academy of American Poets for distinguished poetic achievement.
• 2016 Robert Creeley Award
• 2016 University Medal for Excellence from Columbia University
• 2017 Poet Laureate of the United States
• 2018 American Ingenuity Award for Education
• 2022 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
• 2023 American Philosophical Society induction
• 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship

Literary wins and nominations

• 2002 Cave Canem Prize for The Body's Question. Smith's book was chosen by Kevin Young.
• 2005 Whiting Award for poetry
• 2006 James Laughlin Award for Duende
• 2008 Essence magazine's Literary Award for Duende.
• 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 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."
• 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction shortlisted for Ordinary Light

Notes

References

References

1. Alter, Alexandria. (June 14, 2017). "Tracy K. Smith Is the New Poet Laureate". [[The New York Times]].
2. (June 14, 2017). "Librarian of Congress Names Tracy K. Smith Poet Laureate".
3. "The American Philosophical Society Welcomes New Members for 2023".
4. Alter, Alexandra. (June 14, 2017). "Tracy K. Smith Is the New Poet Laureate". The New York Times.
5. Paul, Crystal. (13 April 2016). "12 Books Of Poetry By Writers Of Color For a More Inclusive National Poetry Month".
6. Nguyen, Sophia. (April 9, 2015). "A Conversation with Tracy K. Smith '94". Harvard Magazine.
7. Nguyen, Sophia. (June 14, 2017). "Tracy K. Smith '94 Named U.S. Poet Laureate". Harvard Magazine.
8. (May 2018). "What's Happening {{!}} Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English".
9. "Phi Beta Kappa Society".
10. "2017 Summer Reading List".
11. (19 August 2015). "Judges for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize Announced". The Griffin Trust.
12. Holmes, Anne. (2018-10-04). "Announcing "The Slowdown" with Tracy K. Smith {{!}} From the Catbird Seat: Poetry & Literature at the Library of Congress".
13. Aggarwal-Schifellite, Manisha. (2021-09-23). "Tracy K. Smith reflects on her new faculty role at Harvard {{!}} From the Harvard Gazette".
14. "Tracy K. Smith Radcliffe Professor {{!}} Harvard Radliffe Institute".
15. "Tracy K. Smith {{!}} Department of English".
16. Poets, Academy of American. "The Line Between Two Worlds: Tracy K. Smith and Elizabeth Alexander in Conversation".
17. Smith, Tracy K.. (2018-11-08). "Poem: A Man's World". The New York Times.
18. Jamison, Leslie. (2019-11-07). "Cult of the Literary Sad Woman". The New York Times.
19. Als, Hilton. (2018-09-24). "Tracy K. Smith's Poetry of Desire".
20. Nguyen, Sophia. (June 14, 2017). "Tracy K. Smith '94 Named U.S. Poet Laureate".
21. Domonoske, Camila. (June 14, 2017). "Tracy K. Smith, New U.S. Poet Laureate, Calls Poems Her 'Anchor'". [[NPR]].
22. Feuer, Alan. (January 25, 2013). "Poetry, Puppets and Playgrounds".
23. (2024-01-26). "Tracy K. Smith delivers a plea for the American soul".
24. gazetteterrymurphy. (2023-11-09). "Tracy K. Smith explores America's past, present challenges, hopes in new book".
25. Dodd, Philip. "A Meeting of Minds". Cycle 5.
26. aapone. (December 31, 1979). "Academy of American Poets Fellowship".
27. "Robert Creeley Foundation » Award – Robert Creeley Award".
28. "Tracy K. Smith {{!}} Office of the Secretary".
29. "2018 American Ingenuity Award Winners". Smithsonian.
30. "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". [[American Academy of Achievement]].
31. (15 May 2024). "Announcements – John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation…".
32. "James Laughlin Award". Academy of American Poets.
33. (February 1, 2008). "ESSENCE's Literary Awards Winners". Essence Magazine.
34. "2015 National Book Awards".
35. "Tracy K. Smith". Academy of American Poets.
36. "Tracy K. Smith Web site".
37. Chiasson, Dan. (August 8, 2011). "Other Worlds: New poems by Tracy K. Smith and Dana Levin".
38. Jollimore, Troy. (April 17, 2012). "Book World: Tracy K. Smith's 2012 Pulitzer-winning poems are worth a read". [[The Washington Post]].
39. Brouwer, Joel. (August 26, 2011). "Poems of Childhood, Grief and Deep Space". [[The New York Times]].
40. "The 2012 Pulitzer Prize Winners: Poetry". The Pulitzer Prizes.
41. Saxon, Jamie. (April 16, 2012). "Update: Princeton's Tracy K. Smith wins Pulitzer Prize for poetry". Princeton University.
42. "Bios of 2005 Whiting Writers' Award Recipients". Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.