Meredith College Announces 2025 Summer Reading Program Selection

Meredith College has announced the Summer Reading Program selection for 2025 is Tracy K. Smith’s memoir Ordinary Light, a finalist for the National Book Award. The College will welcome Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and memoirist, to campus in the fall 2025 semester.

About the Book

Ordinary Light covers the years between Smith’s elementary school years and her college years and ends with the loss of her mother when Smith was in her early 20s. The memoir recounts various impactful moments. Through these vignettes, Smith explores how family, faith, education – and, finally, loss – helped shape her sense of identity. 

“Ordinary Light explores themes and experiences that will be familiar to Meredith students and raises issues around identity that many young people face in college,” said Ashley Hogan, co-chair of the Summer Reading Program Committee. “Additionally, the memoir’s complexity and literary merit will challenge and enrich incoming students.”

About the Author

Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator, and librettist. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-19, during which time she spearheaded American Conversations: Celebrating Poetry in Rural Communities with the Library of Congress, created the American Public Media podcast The Slowdown, and edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.

Smith is the author of five poetry collections: Such Color: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2022 New England Book Award; Wade in the Water, which was awarded the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Life on Mars, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende, winner of the 2006 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets; and The Body’s Question, which received the 2003 Cave Canem Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in nonfiction. Her memoir-manifesto, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, was a Time magazine and Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her next book, Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (W. W. Norton & Company, November 18, 2025), will be an exploration of poetry itself. Smith will show how reading and writing poetry allows us to confront life’s many uncertainties and losses, to build camaraderie with strangers, and to understand ourselves.

Among Smith’s other honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Academy Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Harvard Arts Medal, the Columbia Medal for Excellence, a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, and an Essence Literary Award. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She is also the recipient of Chicago’s 2024 Harold Washington Literary Award.

She is a Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. 

Additional Student Programming

In addition to offering an evening campus and community-wide lecture featuring Smith, Meredith will host a book signing, a luncheon with students and faculty, and other student-focused programming. In the fall, all English 111 instructors will assign her work in their classes, and First Year Experience classes will have an assignment related to the memoir.

First-year students will also discuss the book in their advising groups, facilitated by their Faculty Advisor or another faculty/staff member and their Student Advisor, early in the fall semester.

The author visit is co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Lillian Parker Wallace Fund.

Learn more about the 2025 Summer Reading Program