[7] The work of Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Rita Dove also became significant influences.

She taught summer sessions at Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in 2011, 2012, and 2014 and was the 2014 Robert Frost Chair of Literature.

[12] In 2006, she joined the faculty of Princeton University, where she was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa[13][14] and the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities.

[20] She is the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute[21] In his review of Life on Mars, Troy Jollimore selects Smith's poem "My god, it's full of stars" as particularly strong, "making use of images from science and science fiction to articulate human desire and grief, as the speaker allows herself to imagine the universe:"[3] ... sealed tight, so nothing escapes.

In his review of the collection, Joel Brouwer also quoted at length from this poem, writing that "for Smith the abyss seems as much a space of possibility as of oblivion:"[22] Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone, That the others have come and gone — a momentary blip — When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic, Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding, ... Dan Chiasson writes of another aspect of the collection: "The issues of power and paternalism suggest the deep ways in which this is a book about race.

Smith’s deadpan title is itself racially freighted: we can’t think about one set of fifties images of Martians and sci-fi comics, without conjuring another, of black kids in the segregated South.

"[8] About The Body's Question, Lucie Brock-Broido writes: "How delightful it is to fall under the lucid and quite more than lovely spell of Tracy K. Smith's debut collection.

And they are pristinely beautiful without ever being precious.”[23][note 1] Smith has received praise throughout her books for her questions on relationships, identity and sexuality.

[24][25] Hilton Als of The New Yorker writes: "Part of the gorgeous struggle in Smith’s poetry is about how to understand and accept her twin selves: the black girl who was brought up to be a polite Christian and the woman who is willing to give herself over to unbridled sensation and desire.

Smith is writing the librettos for two operas, one about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses[27] and their competing visions for New York City (a project with composer Judd Greenstein and video artist Joshua Frankel).