Tracy K. Smith
As the Bingham Visiting Writer, poet Tracy K. Smith read from her powerful, sometimes haunting, work during the Martin Luther King Assembly. Ms. Smith is the director of Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light, shortlisted this fall for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, and three books of poetry. Her collection Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Ms. Smith’s Duende won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Essence Literary Award. In 2014, the Academy of American Poets awarded her the Academy Fellowship, given to one poet each year to recognize distinguished poetic achievement.
“A poem asks us to sink into our self — to find the quieter, less pushy voice you might contain. That is what I’m always trying to do. As a writer, you try not to sound like yourself and to come up with different ways of writing about things.”