Intention for Sisters (essay)

Tracy K. Smith is the author of five poetry collections, all with Graywolf Press, including Such Color: New and Selected Poems (2021), which won the New England Book Award; Wade in the Water (2019), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and Life on Mars (2011), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her nonfiction books include Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (W. W. Norton, 2025); To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023); and Ordinary Light (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), a finalist for the National Book Award. She is the cotranslator, with Changtai Bi, of My Name Will Grow Wide like a Tree: Selected Poems of Yi Lei (Graywolf, 2020), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and coeditor, with John Freeman, of There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage, 2021). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harold Washington Literary Award, and the Academy Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. From 2017 to 2019 she served as the twenty-second poet laureate of the United States. She is now the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. (updated 4/2026)