Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and raised in Fairfield, California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, later holding a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

Smith served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. Her poetry collections include The Body’s Question, Duende, Life on Mars—which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry—and Wade in the Water; she has also written the memoir Ordinary Light and the poetry book Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times.