Tracy K. Smith, 2012 Pulitzer Prize winning poet

Poet and educator Tracy K. Smith was born on April 16, 1972. As of 2012 she has published three collections of poetry. Her collection Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Smith received her B.A. 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 the City University of New York, the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. In 2006 she joined the faculty of Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing.

Smith lives, with her family, in Brooklyn, NY.

Life on Mars: Poems
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Paperback: 88 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press (May 10, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1555975844
ISBN-13: 978-1555975845
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.3 inches

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize

A 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominated Book

New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, whose “lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself
To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What
Would your life say if it could talk?

—from “No Fly Zone”

With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like “love” and “illness” now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.

Duende: Poems
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Paperback: 80 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press; First Printing edition (May 29, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1555974759
ISBN-13: 978-1555974756
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.6 x 0.3 inches

Winner 2008 Essence Literary Award for Poetry (AALBC.com was on the selection committee)

Every poem is the story of itself.
Pure conflict. Its own undoing.
Breeze of dreams, then certain death.
—from "History"

Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico García Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead the artist toward revelation, but it must also, Lorca says, accept and even serenade the possibility of death. Tracy K. Smith's bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival. Duende gives passionate testament to suppressed cultures, and allows them to sing.

The Body's Question: Poems
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Paperback: 72 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press (October 1, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1555973914
ISBN-13: 978-1555973919
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.4 inches

Winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

The Body's Question debuts Tracy K. Smith's ambitious and engaging new voice

You are pure appetite. I am pure
Appetite. You are a phantom
In that far-off city where daylight
Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone.
—from "Self-Portrait as the Letter Y"

The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith received the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."