There she encountered two poets who would precede her as the national poet laureate: Natasha Trethewey and Rita Dove, a juror for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. “ain was part of my birthright… the very particular pain that was tied up in blood, in race, in laws and war,” she writes in her memoir “Ordinary Light.”Īs a Harvard undergraduate, Smith studied with Seamus Heaney and became part of the Dark Room Collective, a gathering of black writers. Both of her parents grew up in Alabama, and her father, Floyd William Smith, joined the Air Force at age 18 in part to escape the Jim Crow South. Berlind Class of 1952 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. She did, and her path led to Harvard, Columbia and Stanford universities. Young Tracy responded with her first poem, “Humor,” and showed it to her fifth-grade teacher in Fairfield, California. She remembers a jolt of “magic” when she first read Emily Dickinson’s: Born in Massachusetts, she grew up in northern California, where her four older siblings and parents called her “Kitten.” Her house was full of religious faith and scientific curiosity. Smith, the daughter of an engineer and a teacher, is the current U.S.
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