Tracy K. Smith, poet and assistant professor in creative writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts, was one of six international artists selected for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.
The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative is an international philanthropic program that seeks out rising artists from around the world and brings them together with great masters for a year of individual mentoring and creative collaboration. Smith, the only artist selected from the United States, was chosen by mentor Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a provocative essayist also regarded as Germany’s most important contemporary poet.
Smith holds degrees from Harvard and Columbia, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. She has taught creative writing at Princeton since 2005. Her first collection of poetry, The Body’s Question, was awarded the Cave Canem Prize by Kevin Young for the best first book by an African-American poet, and her second collection, Duende, received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Smith’s third collection of poetry, Life on Mars, is coming out in 2011.
Smith said she will now undertake a prose project with Enzensberger’s guidance. “I have the opportunity to work with someone who has 50 more years of experience in life and art,” Smith said. “I want to use his guidance to do something new for myself as a writer.”
The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative was founded in 2002 and is based at the Rolex headquarters in Geneva. Young artists from around the world are nominated to work with major artists in the fields of dance, film, literature, music, theater and visual arts.