The sixth episode of Sounds of Erasure will feature a conversation with Tracy K. Smith. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-19 and is the author of five poetry collections, including The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), Life on Mars (2011), Wade in the Water (2018), and Such Color: New and Selected Poems (2021). Smith will give a talk titled “Against Erasure: The Black Lyric in American Democracy” as part of the event series “Declaration of Independence at 250: The United States and the Fight for/against Democracy” organized by the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck and will continue the conversation about erasure with Mahshid Mayar and Michael Fuchs as part of the Erasure Poetry Project.