COMING NOVEMBER 18, 2025
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet reveals how poetry is a powerful tool of connection and understanding in a fractured world.
Drawing on deep passion and personal experience, former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith demystifies the art form that has too often been mischaracterized as “inaccessible,” “irrelevant,” or “intimidating.” She argues that poetry is rooted in fundamentally human qualities innate to our capacities to love, dream, question, and engage across diverse cultures and backgrounds. Lifting the veil on her own creative process, Smith shows us how reading and writing poetry allows us to confront life’s many uncertainties and losses, to build camaraderie with strangers, and to understand ourselves. She grounds readers in the technical elements of the craft and provides close readings of the works of contemporary poets such as Joy Harjo, Danez Smith, and Francisco Márquez, alongside classic poems by Dickinson, Keats, Millay, and others. By reimaging and reexamining the age-old art form, Fear Less is a warm invitation to find meaning, consolation, and hope through poetry.
another language
Another Language is a weekly Substack newsletter in which I turn to poems, and poetry’s courageous philosophy of being, to bear genuine and vulnerable witness to my own fears and hopes in this time of rapid change.
I’m lucky to have spent my life in communities characterized by curiosity, creativity, hope and shared inspiration. But as we move further into this unfolding century, I find myself needing more spaces of honesty, compassion and courage. Not to debate nor to wield authority over others—things so many of our shared spaces and platforms seem to encourage or require—but to practice care, to admit vulnerability, and to help one another heal, hope and imagine a world in which everyone is urgently needed.
I hope that what gets built here is a community and an unfolding conversation in which we—you and I—can be honest with ourselves and generous with one another.