Princeton’s Tracy K. Smith Wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Tracy K. Smith, an assistant professor of creative writing in Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, today won the 2012
Tracy K. Smith
Pulitzer Prize for poetry for “Life on Mars,” which the prize committee calls “a collection of bold, skillful poems, taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and pain.”
“Life on Mars,” published by Graywolf Press in 2011, is Smith’s third published collection. “This news is particularly elating, because I think of the book as a tribute to my father, who passed away in 2008,” she said.
Smith, who lives in Brooklyn, first learned of her winning from her husband, who had just read it on The New York Times website. She had just come in from running.
The Pulitzer Prize for poetry recognizes a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. The poems in “Life on Mars” are set in a futuristic place but explore the dark moments of human life on Earth in the present. For example, one poem tells of a daughter imprisoned in the basement by her own father; another focuses on celebrity culture; and another finds the poet herself losing her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.
Comments
Powered by Facebook Comments
