Tracy K. Smith explores America’s past, present challenges, hopes in new book

Tracy K. Smith taught herself to meditate in the summer of 2020, anxious and grieving the loss of Black lives around the country like those of George Floyd and others. Sitting every day in an Adirondack chair under an oak tree in her backyard, she would burn a little sage or cedar, close her eyes, and breathe.

The sessions, which started as a way of “holding herself together” amid the “din of human division and strife,” became a time to reflect on the past, to conjure visions of family members and ancestors who offered consolation, comfort, and guidance.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and professor of English and of African and African American Studies writes about this experience in her new book, “To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul.” A personal manifesto on memory, family, and history, the work tackles questions including how the citizens of this nation, now 400 years into the American experiment, can come together to a new view of their shared past.

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