Tracy K. Smith | Knowledge & Wisdom

“Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry—and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.”

—Tracy K. Smith (born April 16, 1972, in Falmouth, MA). This Pulitzer Prize winner and two-term U.S. poet laureate celebrates her birthday, fittingly, during National Poetry Month. Now the director of creative writing at Princeton University, she returned to New England this winter to accept the Hall-Kenyon Prize for American Poetry, which is named in honor of the late New Hampshire poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon.