Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. She was the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States (2017–2019). Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she earned her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her collection Life on Mars (2011) won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The collection mourned her father — a NASA engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope — through poems that moved between the cosmos, science fiction, and elegy. It was praised for its ambition, intelligence, and emotional power. Smith's other collections include The Body's Question (2003), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and Duende (2007). Her memoir Ordinary Light (2015) described her childhood in a religious family in California. She is widely considered one of the most important American poets of her generation.