Sophia Franchi ‘GRAD writes in:
Award-winning poet and memoirist Tracy K. Smith will read from her work on Wednesday, February 3, 2016, at 8:00 P.M. in Wesleyan University’s Memorial Chapel, 221 High St, Middletown, CT.
Tracy K. Smith is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in nonfiction and was selected as a Notable Book by The New York Times and The Washington Post. She has also written three acclaimed books of poetry: Duende, The Body’s Question, and Life on Mars, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. Her other honors include a Whiting Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the James Laughlin Award, and the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is currently the director of Princeton University’s creative writing program.
At times political, whimsical, and always meditative, Smith’s poems speak to the role of art and to the conception of what it means to be American. “In Life on Mars, Smith shows herself to be a poet of extraordinary range and ambition,” says The New York Times Book Review. “. . . As all the best poetry does, Life on Mars first sends us out into the magnificent chill of the imagination and then returns us to ourselves, both changed and consoled.”
Booklist calls Ordinary Light “a gracefully nuanced yet strikingly candid memoir about family, faith, race, and literature” and praises Smith for her ability to “hold our intellectual and emotional attention ever so tightly as she charts her evolving thoughts on the divides between races, generations, economic classes, religion and science.’” BBC’s Between the Lines says, “Ordinary Light is a lament, an homage, a discovery, a blessing.”
Free and open to the public. Reception and book signing to follow the reading. For more information, please call 860.685.3448 or visit http://www.wesleyan.edu/
writingevents.
Date: Wednesday, February 3
Time: 8-10 PM
Place: Memorial Chapel