Professor Profiles: Tracy K. Smith

For a quarter century, the Hubble Space Telescopehas continually transformed our understanding of outer space. Last month, it spotted a galaxy 13 billion light-years away — thesmallest, faintest and farthest galaxy yet — causing us to wonder what may be out there looking at us, flickering in the distance. This human fascination with the universe’s vastness is but one of Tracy K. Smith’s interests in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poems, “Life on Mars.”

“No matter the topic or theme or even pretext of any given poem, I think that what most of my poems are asking, in the simplest of terms, is ‘What do we do to one another? Why? What is the effect?’ ” Smith said in an interview conducted by email.

While Smith, who joined the University’s faculty as Professor of Creative Writing in 2005, started writing “Life on Mars” to playfully explore a sci-fi future, the book later became a tribute to her father, a NASA engineer who had worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Following her father’s passing, Smith’s poetry helped her examine the ideas and feelings emerging with her grief.

“Poems seemed capable of inviting transformation,” Smith explained. “I loved that in examining something small and seemingly inconsequential, a poem could happen upon remarkable discoveries.”

Smith stepped onto Harvard’s campus as an undergraduate who “vaguely dreamt of becoming a writer, though I had no real sense of how a person did such a thing.” A member of the Class of 1994, Smith’s English courses at Harvard as well as the many poetry readings she attended “imparted a particular sense of curiosity and reverence for poems.” Smith still draws from these fond educational experiences at Harvard and others from her time at Columbia, where she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1997, when teaching her beginning and advanced poetry courses.

“I think about the weight my teachers’ words had for me and how they gently but firmly guided me to think differently, more rigorously about language. I am grateful for their encouragement to risk more and more in my poems — to attempt more than I thought I could manage — and these are things I hope I'm able to offer my current students,” she said.

Smith won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2012 for “Life on Mars,” but she has received many accolades for her work over the years. Her first book, “The Body’s Question,” won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, while her second, “Duende,” won the 2006 James Laughlin Award. Most recently, Smith received the Academy of American Poets 2014 Fellowship.

“I know how many deserving books there are that don't get the same kind of recognition, and so I'm also humbled by something like the Pulitzer. I think that receiving a prize is like having someone say, ‘Keep going, keep doing this thing.’ And every writer needs that kind of encouragement,” she said.

Currently, Smith is exploring other forms and genres. Her memoir “Ordinary Light” is set to come out from Alfred A. Knopf Inc. this coming spring. She is also translating the work of Chinese poet Yi Lei and collaborating with composer Judd Greenstein and director Joshua Frankel on an opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.