Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith has spent her career exploring some of our most enduring questions: who we are, what connects us, and how language can help us make sense of an uncertain world. The 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, Smith is the author of Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; the National Book Award finalist memoir Ordinary Light; To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul; and, most recently, Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, which considers poetry as a source of courage, connection, and understanding amid upheaval. Her next poetry collection, The Forest, will be published in March 2027. Smith is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. At SVWC Winter, she brings a poet’s eye to our central question: what remains distinctly human in an age of profound technological change?