Princeton University Professor Named U.S. Poet Laureate

PRINCETON, NJ — Princeton University professor Tracy K. Smith has been named the Library of Congress’s 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, the university announced on Wednesday. Smith will open the Library of Congress’s annual literary season with a reading of her work at the Coolidge Auditorium in the fall. She is a professor of creative writing in the university’s Lewis Center for the Arts.

“It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching,” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said. “Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and memory to life; calls on the power of literature as well as science, religion and pop culture. With directness and deftness, she contends with the heavens or plumbs our inner depths — all to better understand what makes us most human.”

“Tracy K. Smith is a gifted writer whose work sparkles with insight, imagination and grace,” Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber said. “We are fortunate that she teaches at Princeton, and I am delighted that she will now be our country’s poet laureate.”

In 2012, Smith won Pulitzer Prize for poetry for "Life on Mars," her third published collection. Her collection “Duende” won the 2006 James Laughlin Award and the 2008 Essence Literary Award. Her other published works include “The Body’s Question,” winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2002, and “Ordinary Light,” a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in nonfiction and selected as a notable book by “The New York Times” and “The Washington Post.”

“I am profoundly honored,” Smith said of her most recent recognition. “As someone who has been sustained by poems and poets, I understand the powerful and necessary role poetry can play in sustaining a rich inner life and fostering a mindful, empathic and resourceful culture. I am eager to share the good news of poetry with readers and future readers across this marvelously diverse country.”

Other U.S. Poet Laureates from Princeton University include two alums: William Meredith, a member of the Class of 1940; and W.S. Merwin, a 1948 alumnus. Allen Tate, who served as poet laureate from 1943-44, helped found the creative writing program at Princeton.

Smith’s other awards and honors include holding the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University from 1997 to 1999, and receiving a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award and a 2005 Whiting Writers' Award.

In 2014, the Academy of American Poets awarded her the Academy Fellowship, given to one poet each year to recognize distinguished poetic achievement. In 2015, she won the 16th annual Robert Creeley Award and in 2016 was awarded Columbia University’s Medal for Excellence.

She was also selected to participate in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, which recognizes rising artists from around the world. She has taught at the City University of New York, the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University.

Raised in northern California by a family that has deep roots in Alabama, Smith started her journey as a poet at Harvard University, where she graduated in 1994 with a bachelor's degree in English and American literature and Afro-American studies. Three years later, she completed an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University.

During her time as a student, Smith learned from poets such as Seamus Heaney, Linda Gregg, Mark Doty and Henri Cole, but she singles out Lucie Brock-Broido as her mentor, who inspired Smith's own writing and her teaching style. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2006.

Patch file photo