Great News: Pulitzer Prize winner, 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate, and Harvard University professor Tracy K. Smith will join the faculty for the 2026 edition of the Himalayan Literature Festival & Writers Workshop in Kathmandu
Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator and librettist. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-19, during which time she spearheaded American Conversations: Celebrating Poetry in Rural Communities with the Library of Congress, launched the American Public Media podcast The Slowdown, and edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.
Smith is the author of five poetry collections and two memoirs, most recently Such Color: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2022 New England Book Award, and To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul. Her volume Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. She is the co-translator (with Changtai Bi) of My Name Will Grow Wide like a Tree: Selected Poems of Yi Lei, and co-editor (with John Freeman) of There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis. Her nonfiction exploration of poetry as an antidote to the polarization and alienation of the 21st Century—Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times—will be published this fall by W.W. Norton.
Smith is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Philosophical Society, and the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University.
