Middlebury College Axinn Center for the Humanities will present “The Weight of History” a poetry reading and talk by Tracy K. Smith on March 15, at 4:30 p.m., in Wilson Hall of McCullough Student Center. 

Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and U.S. Poet Laureate (2017-2019). Her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection “Life on Mars” (2012) was also voted a New York Times Notable Book, and the New Yorker, Library Journal, and Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year. She has won numerous awards and recognition for her other work, including the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets for her second book, entitled “Duende,” and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, for her fourth book’s examination of the contradictions tied up in America’s history. Smith is currently the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of English and of African American Studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.