In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet and professor Tracy K. Smith.  Smith served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, and her book of poetry Life on Mars (Greywolf Press, 2011) received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.  Smith is Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute as well as professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.  Smith discusses her numerous works of poetry, and her recent, more essayistic book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Penguin, 2023), the poetics of blackness, the significance of the ancestral for her life and work and how her critical inhabitation of spirituality shapes her work.