Tracy K. Smith  Tracy K. Smith (born April 16, 1972) is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published four collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume "Life on Mars". Her memoir, "Ordinary Light", was published in 2015. In April 2018, she was nominated for a second term as United States Poet Laureate by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she was raised in Fairfield, California in a family with "deep roots" in Alabama. Her mother was a teacher and her father an engineer who worked on the Hubble telescope. Smith became interested in writing and poetry early, reading Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain in elementary school; Dickinson's poems in particular struck Smith as working like "magic," she wrote in her memoir "Ordinary Light", with the rhyme and meter making Dickinson's verses feel almost impossible not to commit to memory. Reading Dickinson, Smith remembered, she felt “like I was in collusion with someone that knew more about me than I knew about myself." Smith then composed a short poem entitled "Humor" and showed it to her fifth-grade teacher, who encouraged her to keep writing. The work of Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Rita Dove also became significant influences. Smith received her B.A. from Harvard University, where she studied with Helen Vendler, Lucie Brock-Broido, Henri Cole and Seamus Heaney. While in Cambridge, Smith joined the Dark Room Collective. She graduated in 1994, then earned 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. Smith has taught at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. She taught summer sessions at Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in 2011, 2012, and 2014 and was the 2014 Robert Frost Chair of Literature. In 2006 she joined the faculty of Princeton University, where she was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities. On July 1, 2019, she became Chair of Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts. Smith was a judge for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2018, Smith began hosting the podcast and radio program "The Slowdown".