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Tracy K. Smith | Biography, Books, & Facts

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Tracy K. Smith: Tracy K. Smith, American poet and author whose work confronts formidable themes of loss and grief, nascent adulthood, and the roles of race and family in identity through pop culture references and precise descriptions of intimate moments. Read more about her life and work.

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Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The…

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Tracy K. Smith - Poet - Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. She received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2014 and the James Laughlin Award in 2006 for her second book, Duende.

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Poet Tracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts on April 16th, 1972. Smith’s passion for writing blossomed when she was a child. Her mother was a teacher and her father was an engineer, and both of them inspired works that she created in her later years. She continued on to attend Harvard University, receiving degrees in English and American literature and Afro-American studies. During her time at Columbia University, she worked to receive her MFA and studied creative writing.

Smith went on to create and publish four poetry collections titled The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), Life on Mars (2011), and Wade in the Water (2018), all of which won awards. In 2015 she published a memoir titled Ordinary Light which was a National Book Award in nonfiction finalist. Her poetry is known for its fluidity and depictions of moments of intimacy.

Smith has gained an abundance of recognition for her poetry. In 2014, she was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. She was selected to be the U.S. poet laureate in 2017 by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Other awards of hers include her fellowship at Stanford University which lasted for two years, the Rona Jaffe Writers Award in 2004, Pulitzer Prize of Poetry in 2012, 2016 Robert Creeley Award, the 2018 American Ingenuity Award for Education, and a 2008 Essence Literary award.

Smith has also been a professor at a variety of universities including the University of Pittsburgh, the City University of New York, and Columbia University. She currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University and has been working there since 2005. She has also been the director of the writing program at Princeton University since 2015. Upon her teaching career, Smith hosts The Slowdown, an American Public Media program and podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

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Tracy K. Smith reads her poem 'Wade in the Water'

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My God, It's Full of Stars by Tracy K. Smith

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After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being-a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure

That someone was there squinting through the dust,
Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only
To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,
Even for a few nights, into that other life where you
And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?

Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my
Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?
Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep
Or charging through his veins. And he'll never grow old,
Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired

And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen
That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life
In which I'm forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I'll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.

2.

He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That's Bowie
For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play
Within a play, he's trademarked twice. The hours

Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out,
Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens.
But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin.

Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives
Before take-off, before we find ourselves
Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?

The future isn't what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts
For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky
Like migratory souls.

3.

Bowie is among us. Right here
In New York City. In a baseball cap
And expensive jeans. Ducking into
A deli. Flashing all those teeth
At the doorman on his way back up.
Or he's hailing a taxi on Lafayette
As the sky clouds over at dusk.
He's in no rush. Doesn't feel
The way you'd think he feels.
Doesn't strut or gloat. Tells jokes.

I've lived here all these years
And never seen him. Like not knowing
A comet from a shooting star.
But I'll bet he burns bright,
Dragging a tail of white-hot matter
The way some of us track tissue
Back from the toilet stall. He's got
The whole world under his foot,
And we are small alongside,
Though there are occasions

When a man his size can meet
Your eyes for just a blip of time
And send a thought like SHINE
SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE
Straight to your mind. Bowie,
I want to believe you. Want to feel
Your will like the wind before rain.
The kind everything simply obeys,
Swept up in that hypnotic dance
As if something with the power to do so
Had looked its way and said:
Go ahead.

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Don't You Wonder, Sometimes? Poem by Tracy K. Smith - Poem Hunter

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After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they spanHides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More likeSome thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being-a StarmanOr cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure That someone was there squinting through the dust,Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting onlyTo be wanted back badly enough?

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But sometimes I forget where I am,
Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,
Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven't left,
The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall.
Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.
And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is
I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like.
Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe
In May, in seasons that come when called,

It's impossible not to want
To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,
Knowing perfectly well what they know.

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I Don't Miss It Poem by Tracy K. Smith - Poem Hunter

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But sometimes I forget where I am,Imagine myself inside that life again. Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,Or more likely colorless light Filtering its way through shapeless cloud. And when I begin to believe I haven't left,The rest comes back. Our couch.

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Article 1

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Tracy K. Smith's latest collection, "Wade in the Water," is a work that illuminates American life with piercing care. It's a slight departure in scope from Smith's previous collection of poetry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Life on Mars" - in accordance with its title, which is drawn from a spiritual that was supposedly used as a guide for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad, this book is more willing to submerge itself in the earthbound world and all its attendant, all too tangible injustices.

One of the collection's most viral works, "Declaration," is a stunning erasure poem of the Declaration of Independence that recharges the document with fire, forcing it to reckon with America's long and hypocritical history of slavery. Another, called "I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It," draws from letters sent between African-American families during the Civil War as its primary source.

Yet Smith's poems here are also driven by a sense of love and desire that's always reaching higher - the book starts out, somewhat playfully, on "Garden of Eden / On Montague Street," and ends with a vision of seemingly post-apocalyptic hope in "An Old Story." Her words are always aching towards transcendence, and that element of the heavenly seems inescapable even within the collection's most historically "grounded" verses.

That kind of curiosity also seems to inform Smith's work as a public poet. Now in her second term as the Poet Laureate of the United States, she's taken poetry readings and discussions to rural communities ranging from Kentucky to Alaska, and she read Tuesday at the University as part of a series coordinated by the Center for Poetry and Poetics. The Cavalier Daily's Arts and Entertainment section recently had the opportunity to ask Smith about her work as the current U.S. Poet Laureate, as well as what went into writing "Wade in the Water."
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Arts and Entertainment: I'm curious about the American Conversations project that you've taken on during your second term as the Poet Laureate - it seems like you've been consistently interested in applying poetry as a means of dialogue and engagement with rural communities. I think you just recently returned from Alaska, and you're due to visit South Dakota, Maine and Louisiana in the future?

Tracy K. Smith: Yes, that's right.

AE: During your travels, what encounters have surprised you? Have you experienced any revelations - poetic or otherwise - while on the road?

TKS: Well, yeah, I feel like these trips have been full of revelation - partly because these different landscapes have been in a single country that I thought I knew so well. Alaska was mind-blowing in that regard, but so were pockets of Kentucky, and that's been exciting to realize - that life here is many different things, just based on where we are. But in different groups of people, I've also been really excited about the ways that poems I have lived a long time with have been transformed by other people's perspectives on what those poems are useful in contemplating.

I'm not saying that you can find anything you want in a poem, that there's no fixed material - but I am saying that people are really good at allowing poems an array of topics to be helpful to them, even if they are really thinking about one thing. I've read poems in addiction facilities, youth detention centers, retirement homes, as well as libraries and community centers, and some places where people are really struggling with specific questions. Like, "addiction has ruled my life, I'm getting free of that, I can see myself differently - this poem about love helps me see myself differently, and it helps me to think about addiction in different terms." That's really exciting to me. It makes me realize that there's a ... I want to call it a skill, but I think it's more like this involuntary ability that we all have to take a poem and to make it relevant to what's on our mind. That's exciting to me.

But then, I've also been excited by the ways that the conversations about poems have behaved differently from one place to another. So, sitting in a library and reading poems and talking about what they make us notice and remember - that's familiar in a lot of ways to what I do at a literary festival or even in a classroom. But to sit in a retirement home where half of the people are not verbal, they're listening and responding in more visceral or very subtle ways to a poem - that's been profoundly moving, to think that not even only about conversation as we tend to imagine it, but sometimes the fact of being together in a space, listening together, and feeling things together. Sometimes that can be a profound experience, even if it doesn't involve a lot of dialogue.

AE: Right, yeah. I agree. When you started out [as the Poet Laureate], were these communities - these places that were kind of out of the way - did you seek these out immediately? Were these places that you knew you wanted to go not just to create poetry, but also to have dialogue about it?

TKS: Well, yes. I knew that I wanted to test out an idea that I had that poetry is good at bridging different kinds of divides, because we've lived in a culture where for the last couple of years, we've been talking a lot about division - talking a lot about how Americans of different backgrounds cannot relate to each other. And I just don't believe that. I believe that we are of urgent importance and deep curiosity to one another, and I've suspected that poetry could be a way of bringing those kinds of opportunities for quiet and earnest conversation ... poetry, in that way, is a great vehicle for bridging the apparent divide between life in the city and life in the heartland of this country.

AE: Yeah, I think that's really necessary, and that actually segues into my next question. I'd like to know more about your process of curating the recent anthology "American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time." It obviously showcases this really stunning lineup of contemporary American poets, but was there any broader narrative of America that you were seeking to illuminate through that text?

TKS: I wanted to illuminate what I think is the reality - that America is many different narratives. So I was excited to look in different directions for poets who shed light on different facets of American life - maybe because of their age, maybe because of their cultural background, maybe because of the geography they're writing from, but also because of the subject matter they take on. Some people are writing about childhood, some people are writing about loss, some people are writing about mental illness, some people are writing about surviving the suicide of a sibling. People are writing about place in different ways.

The other kind of diversity that I was excited to represent was [in] language, or the approach to the poetic art form. So there are poems that are plain-spoken, poems that are a little more musical, poems that sprawl across the page, poems that are compressed. I wanted a reader to say, "Oh, poetry is many things, and I can become comfortable with them one at a time," or "I can enjoy them in all these different ways." So I imagine - I hope - this could be a book that speaks to somebody who hasn't spent much time with poems equally as well as it speaks to someone who has always read and loved and even written poetry.

AE: I think that's really important. It reminds me of the mission of this campaign called "#TeachLivingPoets" - I think that's something that, especially when your primary exposure to poetry is just through your elementary school curriculum, that's something that you don't necessarily receive. And for students who are from marginalized communities, being able to see yourself reflected in poetry is sometimes a privilege.

TKS: Yeah, it's huge to realize, "Oh, God, my story is a story that someone thinks is worthy of a poem." And there are differences between the way we talk and the way poems behave on the page, but to dive into poems that are rooted in the contemporary lexicon eliminates the need for footnotes and all of these things that happen when you're reading a 19th- or 18th-century poem as a student.

AE: Now I wanted to ask a couple questions about "Wade in the Water," and your crafting process and what went into writing those poems. My first observation was that it functions as both a meditation on and reckoning with American history, especially in those poems that incorporate archival fragments - like in "I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It," there are those letters from African-American families during the Civil War and writings from veterans attempting to claim the pensions that they'd been legally promised. How did you realize that you wanted to yield the poem to those voices?

TKS: Well, it was in reading the material that I thought was just going to be background to a poem that I would write from my own imagination. I saw these voices on the page and they leapt to life - there was a mother in the early sections of that poem who said, "I am old and my head is blossoming / for the grave," and I thought, "This is poetry." People are resorting to poetry in order to make these urgent appeals; I don't have to write over that. I can just get out of the way and gather them together so that many of us can listen together to this chorus of voices. And then that was just so exciting - suddenly I started hearing this incredibly compelling story of the experience of being enslaved, fighting for these values that are not abstractions of freedom and humanity, and then dealing with what was withheld. It suddenly seemed like a kind of gospel to me, all of these different people experiencing one large trend.

AE: Right. I felt a similar impulse in "The Greatest Personal Privation," which did that really marvelous work in inhabiting the voices of the enslaved women, Patience and Phoebe. Even among well-meaning Americans who have this abstract understanding that slavery was horrific, there's this inability to grasp that enslaved people were people who had their own subjectivities and felt as deeply as anyone else. Was that part of your conscious poetic project in writing these poems?

TKS: Yeah, but it wasn't because I wanted to show that to people so that they could understand - it was because I wanted to feel that. I wanted to say, "These voices are lost." So I found all that correspondence in a history called "Dwelling Place" by Erskine Clark, and he also included the one surviving letter that was written from members of that family that Phoebe and Patience belonged to, to another person within the family, and I said, "God, how much is lost? How much was never written down? How much will we never know?" I wanted to summon that. It was a wish, a wishful act, to say, "I'm gonna use all that language that's pointed in one direction to see if I can very intentionally hear these other voices." It was something that I hoped I could experience myself and then invite other people to experience alongside me.

AE: That's an important distinction, and I like your description of it as a summoning as opposed to a performance. I know that within communities of writers of color - and specifically Black writers - there are people who are dissatisfied that the part of the work that's most palatable is the performance of trauma. Do you feel conscious of that when you're navigating your own work?

TKS: Well, I definitely am looking for the points of view within the material that are less obvious, and also the ones that challenge or destabilize me and whatever certainty I think I might be bringing to the process. I'm not satisfied with a prevailing version of trauma that seems foreign, that seems contained and ... well, I don't want to say untranslatable, but I'm interested in something that can hit me and work its way inside of me, no matter what my cultural point of reference is, no matter what my vocabulary is, no matter what my time period is. I want to feel something that's so close to the bone that categories don't matter, even though the experience of that also enlivens what we imagine we know about specific cultural experience.

AE: Yeah, I think that's really vital. That actually takes me to my final question - there are so many unexpected yet poignant encounters with the divine throughout "Wade in the Water," whether it's those "sightings, flashes, hints" we get of "The Angels" or God driving a Jeep and later "returning to everywhere" in "Hill Country." How do those moments fit into your broader poetic understanding of faith and devotion?

TKS: I don't know if I have a good answer for that. I'm writing those poems because I feel that we live with great proximity to the holy, and it's exciting, and it's scary. Those poems that you mention also locate the holy in the natural world - it has little to do with us as humans and what we intended or what we've thought into being. I like that because I feel like I do catch glimpses of that when I'm looking out my window, when I'm walking and I'm small because the trees and the animals are big. So it's not so much a project as it is just bearing witness to something that feels to me very real.

But then, I guess there's something that is intentional. Because a poem is many things, but one of them - for me - is the wish to be in contact with my larger and maybe even eternal self, the self that isn't confined to 2018, isn't confined to even the human perspective that I live within. It's this very wishful thing, to be connected to this larger oneness. I like that language is a path towards that. Language can tell me, "That's not beautiful, that's not sound, so it can't be true. Go back and start over."

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'Bridging the apparent divide': Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith shares her perspective on poetry

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Tracy K. Smith's latest collection, "Wade in the Water," is a work that illuminates American life with piercing care.

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Article 2

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Tracy K. Smith is currently in her second term as the 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate and is also a professor at Princeton University.
Credit: Emily Xu

United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith spoke about reconciling poetry with modern political and technological culture at the Philomathean Society's Annual Oration.

Smith, who has published five books and won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 poetry collection "Life on Mars," addressed a crowd of more than 300 students and community members in a lecture titled "Why Poetry? Why Now?" Throughout her hourlong talk in Meyerson Hall, she shared anecdotes and read various poems to show how poetry can provide an alternative to the impersonal nature of the digital age.

"In some ways, the question 'Why poetry?' disheartens me," Smith said. "I wonder why poetry is one of the few art forms that's subject to such a persistent need for defense. We don't hear 'Why fiction?,' 'Why film?,' or 'Why dance?'"

Smith contrasted the universal feelings acknowledged in poetry with the modern focus on individual uniqueness, saying that poetry allows a new perspective.

"You might also begin to recognize there are new possibilities of feeling and awareness available to you, ones that take you far beyond those pitched to you by marketing teams of corporations of products," she said.

College Junior Sydney Gelman, who is the Philomathean Society's Annual Oration Director, praised poetry's ability to bring people together at Penn, despite the University's pre-professional climate.

"I feel like a lot of times at Penn we are a very pre-professional society in which it's like work work work, have to get a job at Goldman Sachs," Gelman said. "I personally think literature is an entryway to empathy for groups you don't normally come into contact with."

Smith is in her second termas the 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate, a position she assumed in 2017. She also serves as the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

When reading and speaking about her own poetry, she highlighted her focus on expressing difficult emotions.

"I take part in the struggle that characterizes so much of living," Smith said. "Sometimes that means the anger that I feel because there is something that I know is wrong that I know is happening."

College freshman and Philomathean Society member William San Pedro said the event gave him a new appreciation for contemporary poetry.

"When I think of poetry, the first thing that comes to mind is Shakespeare or Robert Frost," San Pedro said. "There's still poetry happening now, and there's a lot of ways you can appreciate it. This [event] is one of them."

Each year, the Philomathean Society hosts the Annual Oration to bring notable speakers to campus. Past speakers include neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, primatologist Jane Goodall, and political scientist John Mearsheimer.

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U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith explains value of poetry in consumerist society at Penn

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United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith spoke about reconciling poetry with modern political and technological culture at the Philomathean Society's Annual Oration. Smith, who has published five books and won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 poetry collection "Life on Mars," addressed a crowd of more than 300 students and community members in a lecture titled "Why Poetry?

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Article 3

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Like Johnny Appleseed, Smith has been planting the seeds of verse across the U.S.

Smithsonian Magazine |

As a minivan shuttled her to a gala at the Alaska State Library in Juneau, the capstone of her first visit to America's northernmost frontier, the poet Tracy K. Smith stared out the window and soaked up the vastness. The cloud-topped slopes, dense forests, the marshy channels-it was all so free and untamed, especially compared to life on the Princeton University campus some 4,000 miles away.

"Bear!" yelled the driver, a Library of Congress escort.

"Wow!" cried Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States.

Over her three-day trek across Alaska, Smith had marveled at all manner of taxidermy, from the stuffed moose standing sentry in the middle of the Anchorage airport to the buffalo head staring down at her as she read poems at an assisted-living facility in Palmer. But here was the real thing: a black bear, jaunty and unabashed, loping through a Mendenhall Valley subdivision at the edge of Glacier Highway in broad daylight.

"Oh, wow- wow," said Smith, who considers her "spirit animal" to be her rescue dog, a chocolate Lab retriever named Coco. "I don't know if I could live like this."

Reinventing what a PLOTUS (the Library's acronym) can aspire to, Smith had chosen the wilds of Alaska to launch her "American Conversations" tour, a bardic barnstorm she devised to bring the "humanizing power of poetry" to corners of the country typically left off the literary map. Like a poetic Johnny Appleseed, she has been sowing verse-coaxing readers, donating books-in communities unaccustomed to visits by Pulitzer Prize winners from the Ivy League. In an earlier version of the roadshow, Smith had shared her poems (and invited her audiences to share their interpretations) at a Methodist church in South Carolina, an Air Force base in New Mexico and a garment factory turned cultural center in Kentucky. By the end of this year, she will have added more whistle stops, in South Dakota, Maine and Louisiana.

In this age of social media fury, Smith relishes the opportunity to educate and be educated. "We're so trained to just talk and explain and, you know, argue and outmaneuver other people," said Smith, 46, director of the creative writing program at Princeton. "We need more practice being in rooms where we don't know what someone's thinking, where we have to actually listen to get a sense of what might be going on."

Whether reciting a poem about the unimagined costs of suicide at a juvenile detention facility or a meditation on the unresolved legacy of slavery at an indigenous cultural center, Smith radiated a warmth that was unfussy and unscripted. She often spoke without being introduced and never presented herself as the keeper of secret knowledge, even if the poem was her own.

"Hi, my name is Tracy, and I'm a poet, and this is my first time visiting Alaska," Smith told the two dozen seniors who had scooted and shuffled into a semicircle at the Alaska Veterans and Pioneers Home.

Her signature thatch of dreadlocks set her apart from the old men with ball caps commemorating the last century's wars. "I believe that poems help us to touch base with our real selves, with the feelings and the memories that are sometimes hard to express," Smith added. With that, she opened her 2018 collection of poems, Wade in the Water, and introduced her audience to a pair of unconventional angels-grizzled, in leather biker gear, redolent of rum and gasoline-who appear in a dream, "telling us through the ages not to fear."

Like much of Smith's writing, the poem straddles the empirical and the supernatural, drawing on precise, accessible images to wrestle with mysteries of faith and mortality. "I'd be interested to hear what stands out, what you noticed as I read that poem," she said, eyebrows dancing cheerfully.

The response, she would later admit, initially unnerved her: slumped heads, involuntary moans. But Smith waited, encouraging and patient, giving her elderly pupils space to explore whatever image spoke to them.

"These thoughts come into your head-you don't write 'em down, they're gone," Bob Schafer, a 76-year-old Vietnam veteran, finally said. "Sometimes it's just a sentence, a word that comes into your mind, a memory, and you go ahead and make a poem out of that."

"Oh, I love that!" said Smith. "And I feel like it connects to my sense of writing, too. I want to listen to the things that are there and follow where they lead."

The next day, after flying to the remote Yupik hub of Bethel, Smith boarded a flat-bottom aluminum boat and motored down the Kuskokwim River toward the subsistence village of Napaskiak. Attired in Vans skate shoes that immediately became engulfed in mud, she wandered into the K-12 schoolhouse and asked for the principal. Smith had brought copies of American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, a new anthology she edited, which she likes to think of as "a kind of 21st-century prayer book."

Only after the principal thanked her for venturing to such an inaccessible outpost did Rob Casper, head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress, think to confirm that we had indeed come ashore in Napaskiak. "Oh, no," said the principal, Drew Inman. "This is Napa kiak." (Smith did manage to squeeze in a stop at Napaskiak, a little ways upriver, and donate more books to the school library there.)

"Some of the popular notions about poetry, that it's kind of an intellectual luxury or a decorative art, are not only misguided but really deceptive and even cruel," she said. "I feel like I have an opportunity and maybe also a little bit of a responsibility to say, 'You need this thing and you can have it.'"

When Smith was first appointed to her post in 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden saluted her for producing poetry "so big and sprawling in its themes, and at the same time laser-focused in its words." In her four collections of poems, Smith has conjured a cosmic David Bowie, "dragging a tail of white-hot matter," and compared the eldest of her three children (8-year-old Naomi, who joined her on this trip) to an "incongruous goat" tethered to a lone tree atop an island of rock. In perhaps her most celebrated poem, Declaration, she applied an erasure technique to the Declaration of Independence, strategically deleting passages to reveal an audit of the nation's founding promise:

In every stage of these Oppressions We Have Petitioned for
Redress in the most humble terms;
Our repeated
Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

Raised in a Northern California exurb by an Air Force father and a prayerful mother, both with Alabama roots, Smith longed to break free. As a schoolgirl, on her first trip to camp, she gaped at a forested landscape that bristled with "the potential for some sort of magic," as she put it in her 2015 memoir, Ordinary Light.

On her final night in Alaska, Smith paid an after-hours visit to the edge of Mendenhall Glacier, a river of ice creaking in the darkness. Returning to town, the minivan's headlights picked up a critter-black eyes rimmed in white fur-crossing the road. Smith shrieked. The thunk of the raccoon dampened whatever spirit of adventure remained.
Join Tracy K. Smith at a Smithsonan Ingenuity Festival free event, December 5 at 1 pm, at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Smith will be discussing the impact of history and race in her acclaimed collection of poetry, Wade in the Water.
"Do you think he survived?" asked Naomi. Face buried in her hands, Smith seemed exhausted, having at last absorbed as much of America's outer limits as she had shared.

"Back in the city, someone will ask, maybe very innocently, 'So what's it like? What's rural America like?'" said Smith, who planned to chronicle her travels on the Library of Congress' "American Conversations" website. " It isn't a single thing. It is every person and every place, and that's something we could all be more aware of."

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Tracy K. Smith, America's Poet Laureate, Travels the Country to Ignite Our Imaginations

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Smithsonian Magazine | As a minivan shuttled her to a gala at the Alaska State Library in Juneau, the capstone of her first visit to America's northernmost frontier, the poet Tracy K. Smith stared out the window and soaked up the vastness.