Tracy K. Smith

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts

Tracy K. Smith was raised in Northern California. She received degrees in English and Creative Writing from Harvard College and Columbia University, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University from 1997-99. Her first collection of poems, The Body's Question, was awarded the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Kevin Young, and published in 2003 by Graywolf Press. She is the recipient of a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award, and a 2005 Whiting Award.  Her second collection, Duende, received the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was published by Graywolf Press in 2007. She has taught at the City University of New York, University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University.