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 Poetry for her 2011 collection 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. 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 titled "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. More information...
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