Tracy K. Smith

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 Space Telescope. Her book Life on Mars pays homage to her father's life and work. 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. Smith then composed a short poem titled "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 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.

From 2018 to 2020, Smith hosted the podcast and radio program The Slowdown.

In 2021, Smith joined the faculty of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She was the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute In 2025, she was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, succeeding Jorie Graham.

Smith lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Raphael Allison, and their three children. Allison is the author of Bodies on the Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading (2014). The family previously lived in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.