It's the Brian Laird show on WNYc, good morning everyone.

It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. I'm so happy to have back with us now the two-time poet laureate of the United States Pulitzer Prize winner and these days a Harvard professor of English and African American

studies Tracy K Smith. Her new book is called to free the captives a plea for

the American soul. Tracy always an honor to have you on with us.

Welcome back to WNYC.

Oh, thank you so much, Brian.

What a pleasure to be back.

Those are some big words in the title.

Free and captives and a plea and the American soul start anywhere you like to introduce people to this book but maybe on how you think of the word free or freedom.

Yeah, sure.

A big title and I feel like we're living with such big stakes that I want to invite

readers to think about how we can be useful to the work that lies ahead of us. One of the big concepts that the book seeks to explore

is the nature of freedom as it exists in the American imagination.

And one thing that I've come to believe

is that in our culture, freedom is something that we think of as belonging differently to different people.

So people that I describe in the book as free are those who appear to descend from histories of power or ownership.

And the myth of that notion is that it's something that is a priori, that it's inseparable from their, you know, their very persons.

And in that scheme, the Freed are those who appear to descend from histories of violence, subjugation,

people who have historically been

bought by the free because that freedom is something that's been bought or claimed by way of violence,

enslavement, colonization, and my sense is that these rankings if you will contribute to a misguided sense of what we mean or might mean to one another it urges or encourages us to think about leverage, sending

higher on one of our many national hierarchies. And as we see there's so much

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