Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern 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. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. In 2011, Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; from 2017-2019, she was named the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. n 2021, Smith joined the faculty of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.