Tracy K. Smith, the director of Creative Writing and the Roger S. Berlind Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, has been named the nation’s 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2017-2018.
Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, succeeds Juan Felipe Herrera as poet laureate, and will be Carla Hayden’s first appointment as the Librarian of Congress.
“I am profoundly honored,” Smith said upon news of her appointment earlier this week. “As someone who has been sustained by poems and poets, I understand the powerful and necessary role poetry can play in sustaining a rich inner life and fostering a mindful, empathic and resourceful culture. I am eager to share the good news of poetry with readers and future readers across this marvelously diverse country.”
Hayden said Smith “brings history and memory to life” and was an “attractive choice” for the national honor because the Princeton professor wants to make poetry and the library “accessible and relatable to people all across the country,” Hayden said.
“With directness and deftness, she contends with the heavens or plumbs our inner depths—all to better understand what makes us most human,” Hayden said of Smith.
Dr. Donna Akiba Harper, the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of English at Spelman College, told Diverse that she was thrilled about Smith’s appointment. “She follows in the footsteps of other amazing Black women poets—dating back to Gwendolyn Brooks when the appointment was not yet called poet laureate. Certainly Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey also have demonstrated how to bring light and power to the poetry of Black women.”
As an African-American poet, Smith seems to be a fitting choice for today’s political and cultural climate given her embrace of diversity and her vision for her role as the nation’s poet.
