Margarita Engle is the national Young People’s Poet Laureate, and the first Latino to receive that honor. She is the Cuban-American author of many verse novels, including The Surrender Tree, a Newbery Honor winner, and The Lightning Dreamer, a PEN USA Award winner.
Margarita Engle was born in Pasadena, California, to a Cuban mother and an American father. She earned a BS from California State Polytechnic University and an MS from Iowa State University, and she studied for her doctoral degree in biology at the University of California, Riverside.
The Poetry Foundation announced in May of this year that Engle has been named the Young People’s Poet Laureate. Awarded every two years, the $25,000 laureate title is given to a living writer in recognition of a career devoted to writing exceptional poetry for young readers. The laureate advises the Poetry Foundation on matters relating to young people’s literature and may engage in a variety of projects to help instill a lifelong love of poetry among the nation’s developing readers. This laureateship aims to promote poetry to children and their families, teachers, and librarians over the course of its two-year tenure.
Tracy K. Smith has been named the next poet laureate of the United States and will begin her role this fall, succeeding Juan Felipe Herrera.
Smith is a professor at Princeton University, where she directs the creative writing program.
She has written three poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars , The Body’s Questionand Duende, all from Graywolf Press. She has also written a memoir, Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015).
“As someone who has been sustained by poems and poets, I understand the powerful and necessary role poetry can play in sustaining a rich inner life and fostering a mindful, empathic and resourceful culture,” said Smith in the announcement from the Library of Congress. “I am eager to share the good news of poetry with readers and future-readers across this marvelously diverse country.”
Tracy K. Smith reads her poem "Wade in the Water," which will be published in a book of poetry in 2018.
Tracy K. Smith was twenty-two when her mother died in 1994. In The Body’s Question, her first book of poetry, she writes about that loss.
In the memoir, Ordinary Light, she also considers the loss of her mother and of her father, who died in 2008. That was also the year her daughter, Naomi, was born. Life on Mars in some ways is an elegy for her father who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope program.
... sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time, Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke. So that I might be sitting now beside my father As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe For the first time in the winter of 1959...
Smith reads “Digging” by Seamus Heaney, the poem she feels “invited her to start writing poetry,” and from “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” a poem she wrote about her father.
...Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone, That the others have come and gone — a momentary blip — When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic, Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding...
Tracy graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a BA in English and American Literature and Afro-American Studies. She earned an MFA from Columbia University.
She taught at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, and at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 2005.
Tracy K. Smith discusses her interest in science-fiction and the research for her book, Life on Mars
Smith lives in Princeton with her husband, Raphael Allison, and their three children. Her twin sons, Atticus and Sterling, were born in 2013.
Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize New York Times Notable Book of 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, as they’re formally known, is appointed by the Librarian of Congress for a one year term, serving from October to May, though it is fairly common to renew a Poet Laureate’s term for an additional year.
While the Poet Laureate’s primary duty is to write poetry that reflects the pulse of the nation, poets are also tasked with carrying on the legacy of former Poet Laureate Allen Tate by recruiting poets and authors to contribute to the Library of Congress’ Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. Since the archive’s inception in 1943, over 2,000 writers have contributed audio recordings of their work.
The Library of Congress will announce this week that the next poet laureate will be Charles Wright.
He is the author of nearly two dozen collections of verse and known for blending modernism and the landscape of the American South.
At 78, Wright is retired from teaching at the University of Virginia. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
East of me, west of me, full summer. How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard. Birds fly back and forth across the lawn looking for home As night drifts up like a little boat.
Day after day, I become of less use to myself. Like this mockingbird, I flit from one thing to the next. What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four? Tomorrow is dark. Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.
The sky dogs are whimpering. Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening up from the damp grass. Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day, Go quietly, quietly.
Wright's latest collection of poems is Caribou (2014)
Most of us think of THE Poet Laureate as the one that represents our country. For the U.S., that is Natasha Trethewey who was recently appointed to serve a second term as U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. But many U.S. states and cities have also been designating laureates on a local level.
I'm pleased that there have also been more appointments for children’s poets laureate. Here are three recent appointments.
“Former Urdd Eisteddfod chair Aneirin Karadog has been named as Wales’ next Children’s Poet Laureate. Mr. Karadog said, ‘The role involves working with young people during their formative years, when the imagination is so alive.... One of the appealing factors is a chance to re-light my own imagination through theirs.’”
"UK’s first black children’s laureate: new history curriculum could alienate pupils” from The Guardian (UK) “Ted Hughes, then poet laureate, and his friend and fellow author Michael Morpurgo devised the laureateship—first awarded in 1999 to illustrator Quentin Blake—to mark a lifetime’s contribution to children’s literature and highlight the importance of children’s books. Previous children’s laureates include Jacqueline Wilson, Anne Fine, Michael Rosen, Anthony Browne and Morpurgo.... Blackman is the eighth children’s laureate, inheriting the role from the Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson.”
“The Poetry Foundation announced Tuesday that Revenge of the Lunch Ladies author Kenn Nesbitt will be its next children’s poet laureate, a position the foundation created in 2006 to recognize that ‘children have a natural receptivity to poetry and are its most appreciative audience.’... This honor is not related to the U.S. poet laureate, who is named by the Library of Congress. Nor is it connected to regional poets laureate, such as Eloise Klein Healy in Los Angeles or Juan Felipe Herrera, California’s poet laureate. Nesbitt succeeds J. Patrick Lewis as the fourth poet to hold the position. His numerous books for children—all of them full of child-appropriate silliness—include The Tighty-Whitey Spider, My Hippo Has the Hiccups, and My Foot Fell Asleep. In an interview with outgoing laureate Lewis, Nesbitt listed influences including Lewis Carroll, MAD magazine, and ‘that greatest of all children’s poets, Anonymous.’”
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(2014)