Tracy K Smith

“Poetry isn’t an escape or even a luxury. I’d argue it’s a necessity, a means of living more deeply with reality.” Tracy K Smith

Manchester Literature Festival are delighted to welcome Tracy K Smith to Manchester for a rare UK event. The Poet Laureate of the United States, Tracy is the author of four poetry collections including Life on Mars, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, and Wade in the Water, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She is also the author of the memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Tracy’s work considers the lives of black women through their bodies, their desires, their adventures and their experiences. It looks at the cruelty of humanity through verbatim histories of slavery and the separation of a First Nations boy from his family. It asks questions about life, death, power and race. Vogue magazine described Tracy’s poetry as ‘an awakening itself’, while New York Magazine says she ‘Deftly illuminates America’s generational wounds’.

For this special MLF event, Tracy will perform poems from Wade in the Water and her forthcoming book Eternity: Selected Poems, and discuss her extraordinary work with much loved Manchester-based poet and Scottish Makar, Jackie Kay.

Doors open at 6.30pm, event starts at 7pm