Writing alumna Tracy K. Smith ’97 recently published To Free the Captives, a new memoir, with Knopf.
Using the town of Sunflower, Alabama—where Smith’s father’s family originates and her grandfather returned after World War I—as a locus, Smith muses on Black life, the American experience, family, and history.
In an effort to cope with feelings of dejection during the 2020 George Floyd Protests, Smith began to sift through historical archives, using them to help her navigate the “din of human division and strife.” Employing lyricism and a sense of urgency, Smith investigates America’s nationhood through spiritual, documentative, and personal channels.
“To write a book about Black strength, Black continuance, and the powerful forms of belief and community that have long bolstered the soul of my people, I used the generations of my own patrilineal family to lean backward toward history, to gather a fuller sense of the lives my own ancestors led, the challenges they endured, and the sources of hope and bolstering they counted on,” Smith writes about her memoir. “What this process has led me to believe is that all of us, in the here and now, can choose to work alongside the generations that precede us in tending to America’s oldest wounds and meeting the urgencies of our present.”
“Since her first book of poetry… Tracy K Smith has been a writer to watch,” writes Associate Writing Professor Shane McCrae. “Her poems and prose are forceful, intelligent and musical… To Free the Captives reads like both a travelogue of the journey toward [the] soul [of America]… and, with its descriptions of Smith’s spiritual practices, a rite to conjure that soul.”
According to Washington Post literary critic Becca Rothfeld, “On nearly every page of [To Free the Captives] is a phrase or sentence to marvel over, a word (usually an adjective) so unexpectedly apt that it freshens familiar language.”
To Free the Captives is available for purchase here.
Tracy K. Smith is a translator, librettist, and the author of five highly-acclaimed poetry collections. Her first memoir, Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015), was a National Book Award finalist and her poetry collection Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011) received a Pulitzer Prize. From 1997-1999, Smith was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry and from 2017-2019, Smith served as the 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate.
