The Green-Taylor Lectures: A Black Life and Letters Speakers Series presents, Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith is a Professor of English and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. She is the author of the memoirs To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Knopf, 2023) and Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015), as well as five poetry collections, including Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011) which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. For her writing, Smith has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the twenty-second poet laureate of the United States. Her latest book is Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (Norton, 2025).

The Green-Taylor Lectures is a speaker series celebrating the intersections of Black Studies, Architecture and Design. Over the course of the year, the series will feature voices from across these fields in an effort to illuminate both the unique history of African American architects here at MIT—the Institute’s first Black graduate, Robert R. Taylor, as well as two of the first Black women to attend MIT, Marie Turner and Gloria Green, all studied architecture during their time on campus—and contemporary work in the field that honors the role of worldmaking in the Black expressive tradition.

In conversation with Joshua Bennett, Literature Professor and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT.

Co-sponsored by MIT Architecture, Libraries, Literature Section, Provost, and ICEO.