Cambridge Public Library to Host Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author and Former U.S. Poet Laureate

The Cambridge Public Library will welcome Tracy K. Smith for a poetry reading followed by a Q&A on Wednesday, January 24, from 6-7:30 p.m. in the Main Library Lecture Hall. Smith is the author of To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars. This event is hybrid and registration is required.  

Tracy K. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars. The collection draws upon the genre of science fiction in considering who we humans are and what the vast universe holds for us. Expanding on that theme in her most recent book, To Free the Captives, Smith explores the soul of our nation through the lens of its fraught past as well as her personal history. To Free the Captives has been named a Time and Washington Post Best Book of the Year.  

Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator and opera librettist. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-19, during which time she spearheaded American Conversations: Celebrating Poems 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. She is a professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. 

This event is cosponsored by the Cambridge Public Library Foundation. Porter Square Books will be on site selling copies of Smith’s books.  

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