Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith (born April 16, 1972) is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019.

In 2023, Smith was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Early life Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. 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 received her B.A. from Harvard University, where she studied with Helen Vendler, Lucie Brock-Broido, Henri Cole and Seamus Heaney. 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.

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:" NoteTag|Elizabeth Alexander also writes about Smith’s use of the concept of duende: “Writers and musicians have explored the concept of duende, which might in English translate to a kind of existential blues. Smith is not interested in sadness, per se. Rather, in the strange music of these poems I think Smith is trying to walk us close to the edge of death-in-life, the force of hovering death in both the personal and social realms, admitting its inevitability and sometimes-proximity, and understand its manifestations in quotidian acts. This dark force is nonetheless a life force, which, in the poem 'Flores Woman,' concludes 'Like a dark star. I want to last.' If Duende were wine, it would certainly be red; if edible, it would be meat cooked rare, coffee taken black, stinky cheese, bittersweet chocolate. Tracy K. Smith's music is wholly her own, and Duende is a dolorous, beautiful book." 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.