#  In a New Memoir, Tracy K. Smith Connects Her Life to a Bigger Picture 

 





November 09, 2023

 

 

 Since her first book of poetry, “The Body’s Question,” was published in 2003, Tracy K. Smith has been a writer to watch. Her poems and prose are forceful, intelligent and musical, earning her a Whiting Award and a Pulitzer Prize, among other accolades.

 Smith’s latest book, “To Free the Captives,” is a different kind of work altogether — both a memoir and an examination of race relations in America. Here the former poet laureate writes about her life as a microcosm of the Black American experience. Initially, I expected an examination of our current political moment. But when Smith opened with a look at her own family’s history, I thought that a reasonable way into such an examination; being Black myself, I already knew that any story of generations of a Black family in America is a story of America itself.

   
Read more from *The New York Times* [here](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/books/review/to-free-the-captives-tracy-smith.html).



 

 

 



 

 

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