She graduated in 1994, then earned an M.F.A. While in Cambridge, Smith joined the Dark Room Collective. from Harvard University, where she studied with Helen Vendler, Lucie Brock-Broido, Henri Cole and Seamus Heaney. The work of Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Rita Dove also became significant influences. Smith then composed a short poem entitled 'Humor' and showed it to her fifth-grade teacher, who encouraged her to keep writing. Smith became interested in writing and poetry early, reading Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain in elementary school Dickinson's poems, in particular, struck Smith as working like 'magic,' she wrote in her memoir Ordinary Light, with the rhyme and meter making Dickinson's verses feel almost impossible not to commit to memory. Her book Life on Mars pays homage to her father's life and work. Her mother was a teacher and her father an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Early life īorn in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she was raised in Fairfield, California, in a family with 'deep roots' in Alabama. In April 2018, she was nominated for a second term as United States Poet Laureate by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars.

She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. Smith (born April 16, 1972) is an American poet and educator.

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