Succeed2gether’s Montclair Literary Festival is thrilled to invite you to an evening with former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet Tracy K. Smith To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, a self-examination study on memory, family, and history, exploring how we might come together to a new view of our shared past.

In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching, and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking– personal, documentary, and spiritual– to understand who we are as nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.

“A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils. Tracy K. Smith has also written a book for her children and for us. Hopeful, despite all that she sees and feels so deeply, that the freed will soon be truly free. Beautiful and haunting all at once.”—Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

To Free the Captives begins this journey by assembling a new terminology of American life. Parsing the difference between Free and the Freed, the distance between Time Ago and Soon, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment and offers a compelling argument for the vocabulary of the soul as a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other and to the future.

Tickets to hear Tracy K. Smith in person cost $35, and include one signed copy of the book To Free the Captives (value $27). Unsigned books will be available to be picked up from Festival partner watchung booksellers after the book’s publication on Tuesday November 7, 2023. Books will also be available for collection at the event. Tracy will be signing books after the discussion. BUY TICKETS HERE!

This event will be held in Presentation Hall, The School of Communication and Media, Montclair State University, 1 Normal Ave, Montclair, 07043. Free parking will be available at the Red Hawk Parking Deck for all event ticket holders. If you require any special accommodations to attend, please email montclairliteraryfestival@gmail.com before the event.

Tracy K. Smith is a librettist, a translator, and the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including Life on Mars, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States. She lives in Massachusetts. Photo credit © Andrew Kelly.

Succeed2gether’s Montclair Literary Festival organizing committee wishes to thank its primary festival partners – Montclair State University, Watchung Booksellers, Montclair Public Library – festival sponsors, event sponsors, our many community supporters and volunteers.

Any proceeds from this event will be shared by the Montclair Public Library and Montclair-based non-profit Succeed2gether, which offers free after-school one-on-one tutoring and enrichment classes with the aim of closing the education and opportunity gaps in Essex County, NJ.