Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith (born April 16, 1972) is an American poet and educator. She is currently serving as the 52nd Poet Laureate of the United States, an office she assumed in 2017. She has published three collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume 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." In April 2018, she was nominated for a second term as United States Poet Laureate by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.