Tracy K. Smith

Poet and professor Tracy K. Smith was born on April 16, 1972 in Falmouth, Massachusetts to Floyd and Kathryn Smith. In 1994, she received her A.B. degree in English and American literature and in African American Studies from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She earned her M.F.A. degree from the Columbia University School of the Arts in New York City, New York in 1997.

After graduating from Columbia University, Smith joined Stanford University in Palo Alto, California as a Stegner Fellow. In 2002, she joined Medgar Evers College, City University of New York as an instructor before being hired as a visiting assistant professor in 2005 at Princeton University in New Jersey, where she was promoted to assistant professor in 2006 and to full professor in 2013. Smith led Princeton’s creative writing program from 2015 to 2019 and chaired the Lewis Center for the Arts from 2019 to 2021. In 2017, Smith became the twenty-second poet laureate of the United States. After sixteen years at Princeton University, she returned to Harvard University as a professor of English and of African and African American Studies; and, in 2021, as the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Smith published her first collection of poetry, The Body’s Question, in 2003 followed by Duende in 2007. In 2012, her collection Life on Mars (2011) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She went on to release two additional collections: Wade in the Water (2018) and Such Color: New and Selected Poems (2021). During her tenure as poet laureate, in 2018, Smith edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time. Her daily poetry podcast, The Slowdown, was launched the same year. Smith also published a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2015.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Smith has received numerous awards and honors including the Cave Canem Prize in 2002, the Whiting Award from the Ms. Giles Whiting Foundation in 2005, the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American poets in 2006, the Essence Magazine Literary Award in 2007, the University Medal for Excellence from Columbia University in 2016, the Harvard Arts Medal in 2019, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry in 2019. Since 2021, Smith has served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Smith and her husband, Raphael Allison, live in Newton, Massachusetts. They have three children.

Tracy K. Smith was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 28, 2023.