To Free the Captives is a collection of interlinked essays by Tracy K. Smith that explores her family’s history and legacy in Sunflower, Alabama, the red-dirt town where her father’s family comes from. Smith considers her father’s life and the life of her grandfather through the lens of history. The book is a work of personal and historical nonfiction that illuminates the American past and present. It is a plea for the American soul that traces Smith’s paternal lineage - Black, southern, ordinary and extraordinary - to reveal the losses and lessons that course through her writing.

Tracy K. Smith explores America’s present and past with a keen eye and a lyrical voice in Wade in the Water, a collection of poems that connects our contemporary moment to our nation’s complex history and to a sense of the eternal. These are poems of varying scale: some capture a glimpse of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some transcend the known world into the mystical, the sacred. Smith’s distinctive voice―curious, lyrical, and wry―examines what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture mediated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, personal utterance becomes part of a larger collective voice as the collection includes erasures of The Declaration of Independence and letters from African American soldiers in the Civil War, a found poem composed of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, and a sequence based on testimonies of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a powerful and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.

In Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith imagines a soundtrack for the universe with poems that evoke David Bowie and interplanetary travel. She explores the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence in a sci-fi future devoid of real dangers. She also contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like “love” and “illness” now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. This collection won Smith the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

The Body’s Question by Tracy K. Smith is a debut poetry collection that won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. In these poems, Smith confronts loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood. She gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until she can say, “I was anyone I wanted to be.”