Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Her four poetry collections are The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), Life on Mars (2011) and Wade in the Water (Penguin, 2018). She won the Pulitzer Prize for Life on Mars. She is also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2017 she was named Poet Laureate of the United States. Since being shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, her collection, Such Color: New and Selected Poems, has been published by Graywolf Press (2021). She formerly taught creative writing at Princeton University. 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.
Shortlisted Works
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Judges Sinéad Morrissey (Chair), Daljit Nagra and Clare Pollard have chosen the T. S. Eliot Prize 2018 Shortlist from a record 176 poetry collections submitted by, as Sinéad Morrissey says, ‘a plethora of poetry publishers’. The Shortlist comprises five debut collections, one small press, five men, five women, and two...
