Heavy snow and difficult travel expected again, heaviest snow in southern Minnesota

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

Tracy K. Smith is known for her powerful poetry. She's a 

Pulitzer Prize winner and former U. S. Poet Laureate.

To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul

,” is memoir — a classification she initially resisted. But as she tells MPR News host Kerri Miller, she eventually saw that her own story is a kind of microcosm of America’s story. It’s a meditation on who we’ve been, who we are and who we want to become.

On this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, Smith joins Miller to expand on the ideas in her latest work, as it examines the nature of power, freedom, race, prayer, her parent’s lives, her own drinking and what she calls "the conundrum of history.”

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller podcast on 

for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Shows

Big Books & Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller

Host

Author

Former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith shares a deeply personal portrait of her family, America’s history and her path to sobriety in “To Free the Captives.”

Former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith shares a deeply personal portrait of her family, America’s history and her path to sobriety in her new memoir, “To Free the Captives.”

Tracy K. Smith delivers a plea for the American soul

Go Deeper.

Like this?