Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator and librettist. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-19, during which time she spearheaded American Conversations: Celebrating Poetry in Rural Communities with the Library of Congress, created the American Public Media podcast The Slowdown, and edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.
Smith is the author of five celebrated poetry collections, most recently Such Color: New and Selected Poems. She co-translated My Name Will Grow Wide like a Tree: Selected Poems of Yi Lei with Changtai Bi, and edited There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis with John Freeman. Her memoir Ordinary Light was a National Book Award finalist, and her memoir-manifesto To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, was a Time magazine and Washington Post Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.
Among Smith’s other honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harold Washington Literary Award, the Academy Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Harvard Arts Medal, the Columbia Medal for Excellence, a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Essence Literary Award. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She is a Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
