Smith found her poetic voice as an undergraduate at Harvard once she discovered the Dark Room Collective, a reading series for writers of color that was started in 1989. This energized Smith to create contemporary poetry that did not shrink from political considerations. As she stated in an interview, “I’ve heard so many stories from writers of color who found themselves feeling alone in spaces where their peers just weren’t willing or able to accept the notion that concerns of race, culture, identity, and geography were valid components of poems” (Lee, Esther. “Interview with Tracy K. Smith.” Atlanta Review, vol. 22, no. 1, 2015.). Discovering an African American literary community with a wide range of influences and styles during her undergraduate years at Harvard jumpstarted her writing, as she had widely divergent and exciting examples of how writers of color, many of them were her peers, could navigate the personal and the political.

As an African American poet who has served as US Poet Laureate, the third African American woman to serve in the post, she is aware of the poetic traditions she represents and seeks to grapple with. She is also aware of the need to bring such poetic traditions to a wider