Our 2020 Keynote Speaker is Tracy K. Smith!
We’re thrilled to announce that the keynote speaker for Unbound 2020 will be United States Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and memoirist, the amazing Tracy K. Smith. Tracy will be speaking at the Missouri Theatre on Friday, April 24, 2020. You’ll be able to reserve your free tickets for this event in early 2020 - watch this space for details.
In 2017, Tracy K. Smith was appointed the 22nd United States Poet Laureate. About Smith’s writing, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said, “her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and memory to life; calls on the power of literature as well as science, religion and pop culture. With directness and deftness, she contends with the heavens or plumbs our inner depths—all to better understand what makes us most human.”
Smith is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Nonfiction and selected as a Notable Book by the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as four books of poetry. Her most recent collection of poems, Wade in the Water, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to the nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. The collection draws on sources as disparate as Arthur C. Clarke and David Bowie, and is in part an elegiac tribute to her late father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Telescope. Duende won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Essence Literary Award. The Body’s Question was the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers Award in 2004 and a Whiting Award in 2005. In 2014 the Academy of American Poets awarded Smith with the Academy Fellowship, awarded to one poet each year to recognize distinguished poetic achievement.
Smith’s poems embody the lyrical, rhythmic quality of masters such as Federico García Lorca. At times political, whimsical, and always meditative, they speak largely to the role of art and to the conception of what it means to be American, dealing with the “evolution and decline of the culture we belong to.” Her work also explores the dichotomy between the ordered world and the irrationality of the self, the importance of submitting oneself willingly to the “ongoing conflict” of life and surviving nonetheless—or as in Smith’s own words, “poetry is a way of stepping into the mess of experience.”
After her undergraduate work at Harvard, Smith earned her MFA at Columbia before going on to be a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1997 to 1999. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities, and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. She lives in Princeton.