Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith
Smith in October 2012
Born	(1972-04-16) April 16, 1972 (age 44)
Occupation	Poet, educator
Nationality	American
Genre	Poetry
Notable awards	Cave Canem Prize (2002) James Laughlin Award (2006) Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2012)

Tracy K. Smith (born April 16, 1972) is an American poet and educator. She has published three collections of poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize for a 2011 collection, Life on Mars. About this collection, Joel Brouwer wrote in 2011: "Smith shows herself to be a poet of extraordinary range and ambition. ... As all the best poetry does, Life on Mars first sends us out into the magnificent chill of the imagination and then returns us to ourselves, both changed and consoled."

Smith is a native of Falmouth, Massachusetts. She was raised in Fairfield, California in a family with "deep roots" in Alabama. She received her A.B. from Harvard University in 1994, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University in 1997. From 1997 to 1999 she was a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. She has taught at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. In 2005 she joined the faculty of Princeton University, where she is professor of creative writing.

Smith is a judge for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize.

In his review of Life on Mars, Troy Jollimore selects Smith's poem "My god, it's full of stars" as particularly strong, "making use of images from science and science fiction to articulate human desire and grief, as the speaker allows herself to imagine the universe:"

In his review of the collection, Joel Brouwer also quoted at length from this poem, writing that "for Smith the abyss seems as much a space of possibility as of oblivion:"

Dan Chiasson writes of another aspect of the collection, "The issues of power and paternalism suggest the deep ways in which this is a book about race. Smith’s deadpan title is itself racially freighted: we can’t think about one set of fifties images, of Martians and sci-fi comics, without conjuring another, of black kids in the segregated South. Those two image files are situated uncannily close to each other in the cultural cortex, but it took this book to connect them."