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U.S. Poet Laureate to speak at Penn State on Oct. 19

Tracy K. Smith to offer free reading as this year’s Emily Dickinson Lecturer

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — United States Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Tracy K. Smith will deliver this year’s Emily Dickinson Lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 19 at the Nittany Lion Inn. The reading is free and open to the public.

Smith is the author of several poem collections, including “The Body’s Question” (2003), “Duende” (2007), and “Life on Mars” (2011), which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 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. Her memoir, “Ordinary Light” (2015) — in many ways an elegy for her mother — was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Nonfiction and was selected as a Notable Book by the New York Times and Washington Post.

Smith's next poetry collection, “Wade in the Water” (forthcoming from Graywolf Press in April 2018), includes “found poems” constructed from archival letters that African-American veterans sent to former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln asking for pensions they were owed.

Smith is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. While Smith primarily writes poetry and memoir, she has recently served as librettist on two operas, one of which focuses on slavery “and how it shapes our sense of what is possible for moment to moment in our everyday lives,” she says.

The Emily Dickinson Lectureship in American Poetry is made possible through the generosity of Penn State alumni George and Barbara Kelly. Additional support for the event comes from the Penn State Department of English.

Last Updated October 12, 2017

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