Tracy K. Smith & Kevin Young: Poetry, Place & Race

Tracy K. Smith won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Life on Mars. Her critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light is shortlisted for the 2015 National Book Award in Nonfiction. After spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother’s house, Smith returned to California with a new sense of what it means to be black. Kevin Young is widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation, one who finds inspiration in African American music, particularly the blues, and in the bittersweet history of Black America. Young’s latest compendium Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 draws from all nine of his previously published collections and includes new poems as well.