A visit by the current Poet Laureate of the United States will be one of the major events in the history of Warren County Community College.

WCCC, which has hosted dozens of poets and writers over the years through its Visiting Authors Series, breaks new ground on Thursday, December 6, with a reading by the Poet Laureate of the United States, Tracy K. Smith. The reading, beginning at 7:30 p.m., is free and open to the public. The visit by  Smith will serve as the first event in the college’s new Annex Lecture Center. 

Smith is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015), a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Nonfiction and selected as a Notable Book by the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as three books of poetry. Her most recent poetry collection, Wade in the Water (Graywolf, 2018) ties America’s contemporary moment both to the nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. Her previous collection of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. The collection draws on sources as disparate as Arthur C. Clarke and David Bowie, and is in part an elegiac tribute to her late father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Telescope. Duende (2007) won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Essence Literary Award. The Body’s Question (2003) was the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers Award in 2004 and a Whiting Award in 2005. In 2014, the Academy of American Poets awarded Smith with the Academy Fellowship, awarded to one poet each year to recognize distinguished poetic achievement. In 2016 she won the 16th annual Robert Creeley Award. In 2017, she was appointed the 22nd United States Poet Laureate of the United States of America.  

  After her undergraduate work at Harvard, Smith earned her MFA at Columbia before going on to be a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1997 to 1999. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities, and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. She lives in Princeton. 

The evening reading will be followed by a brief Q & A with the audience and a book signing.  Books will be available for purchase at the reading. 

The WCCC Visiting Authors Series is supported by a grant from the Warren County Cultural and Heritage Commission. All facilities comply with ADA regulations and are fully accessible. Sign language interpretation for any Visiting Authors Series event is available with two weeks’ notice.  

 Warren County Community College offers students the option of earning an Associate of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, the first and only degree of its kind in New Jersey and a member program of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).  For directions to the campus or for more information about the A.F.A. in Creative Writing, please visit www.warren.edu or call 908-835-WCCC.