A Pulitzer Prize–winning poet reveals how poetry is a powerful tool of connection and understanding in a fractured world.Drawing on deep passion and personal experience, former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith demystifies the art form that has too often been mischaracterized as “inaccessible,” “irrelevant,” or “intimidating.” She argues that poetry is rooted in fundamentally human qualities innate to our capacities to love, dream, question, and cultivate community. ...

"Mostly powerless. Completely clueless.Once, they stood next to justice. Now they're standing up for it...When sworn protectors of Earth, the Justice Platoon, are all horribly killed, their former arch-enemies come crawling out of the woodwork. Outnumbered, outgunned, and out of options, the US Government has no choice but to activate the Sidekicks Initiative, dragging the Platoon's middle-aged ex-sidekicks out of retirement.Now these three reluctant, out of shape f...

The Purpose of Getting Lost isn't a story about travel-and it isn't a story with a neat ending. There is no final version of the woman at the center of this book, no moment where everything clicks and stays that way.As Tracy Smith approached fifty and her children grew up, she realized she'd spent years taking care of everyone. Everyone but herself. So she booked a trip. Then another. And another. Over time, thirty countries and five continents became less about di...

**NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • This dazzling memoir from the former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars is the story of a young artist struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America."Engrossing in its spare, simple understatement.... Evocative ... luminous." —The Washington Post**In Ordinary Light, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith tells her...

A visionary new collection by former poet laureate of the United States and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Tracy K. SmithThe forest in Tracy K. Smith’s brilliant new work is and is not a metaphor. While these poems strive to hear and to heed the voices of the earth and its nations of trees, they also test a discomfiting view of humanity, not as divided and opposing factions but as a vast cacophonous family connected by a single deep root.The Forest grapples with viol...

A TIME AND WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A stunning personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might—together—come to a new view of our shared past“A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils...Hopeful...Beautiful and haunting.” —Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again...

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize* Poet Laureate of the United States ** A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice ** A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year *New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, whose "lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter" (Publishers Weekly, starred review...

“Tracy K. Smith’s poetry is an awakening itself.” —VogueCelebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems, her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits o...

Many ministry leaders today watch as their congregations separate into age based groups and miss the profound beauty of worshipping as one body. You want a community where the youngest children and the oldest adults grow together in faith, but the path from age segregation to intentional connection often feels overwhelming. Church Together provides the essential roadmap you need to transform your faith community into a vibrant home for every generation. Authors Traci Smith and David M. Csi...

How do you share the deep mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Resurrection with children? Parents, guardians, teachers, and ministers will find dozens of fun and easy practices for celebrating the Easter season with our kids. The practices and seasonal prayers are grouped into chapters titled Ash Wednesday, Symbols, Lenten Prayers, Lenten Refraining, Lenten Acts of Service, Holy Week, Easter Vigil and Easter Day, and the Season of Resurrection. Smith also offers theological notes guiding parent...

The Spring 2020 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and remains prescient in the digital age by providing readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”As guest-editor Tracy K. Smith writes in her introduction, “I know the most urgent wo...

If you think you’ve heard this old “simple robbery gone wrong” trope before, think again.This time it is a billionaire who would do anything, including the unspeakable, to protect his heir and fortune.In Heir to a Fortune, Tipp has many enemies that would like to see him dead. Vesa is the weekend thrill-seeking lawyer who stumbles upon information that may change her life forever. Let them take you on a ride in this exciting and thrilling page-turner.About the author:...