Tracy K. Smith facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Tracy K. Smith
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Smith in 2017
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| Born | April 16, 1972 Falmouth, Massachusetts, U.S.
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| Education | Harvard University (BA) Columbia University (MFA) |
| Occupation | Poet, educator |
| Title | Poet Laureate of the United States |
| Awards | Cave Canem Prize (2002) James Laughlin Award (2006) Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2012) |
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. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
In April 2018, she was nominated for a second term as United States Poet Laureate by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.
In 2023, Smith was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Early life
Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she was raised in Fairfield, California, in a family with "deep roots" in Alabama. Her mother was a teacher and her father an engineer 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 A.B. 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.
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 is the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute
Personal life
Smith lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Raphael Allison, and their three children. Allison is the author of . The family previously lived in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.
Awards, grants, fellowships
- Grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.
- Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
- Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
- Cave Canem Prize (2002) for The Body's Question. This award honors the best first book by an Afro-American poet; Smith's book was chosen by Kevin Young.
- Whiting Award in 2005 for poetry. This award is for emerging writers.
- James Laughlin Award in 2006 for Duende. This award from the Academy of American Poets honors the best second volume of a poet published in the US.
- Essence magazine's Literary Award in 2008 for Duende. The award honors the best Afro-American literature.
- Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative in 2010. Hans Magnus Enzensberger became Smith's mentor for one year as part of this program; their experience worked together was described in a short article by Philip Dodd.
- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2012 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."
- Academy Fellowship in 2014 given by the Academy of American Poets to recognize distinguished poetic achievement.
- 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction shortlist for Ordinary Light
- 2016 Robert Creeley Award
- 2016 University Medal for Excellence from Columbia University
- 2018 American Ingenuity Award for Education
- 2022 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
- 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship.
See also
In Spanish: Tracy K. Smith para niños
