Toi Derricotte, a poet and chancellor on the board of the Academy of American Poets, said Ms. Smith’s commitment to poetry organizations like Cave Canem, and her skill as a creative writing teacher, made her well suited to being an ambassador for the form.

“She’s been remarkable as a citizen in the community of poets,” she said. “She’ll change a lot of people’s ideas about poetry.”

Ms. Smith often plays with genre in her work and says it serves as “a distancing device.” Some of the verses in her 2007 collection, “Duende,” were inspired by westerns. Her 2011 collection, “Life on Mars,” which won the Pulitzer, is inflected with dystopian themes and tropes from science fiction. Many of the poems are meditations on cosmic affairs, like the incomprehensible vastness of space and humanity’s efforts to understand our place in the universe, but the collection is also anchored in the personal. The escapist, fantastical themes in the collection are blended with intimate reflections: mournful, elegiac verses about the death of her father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

“I was thinking about loss, and thinking as someone who was about to become a parent,” said Ms. Smith, who lives in Princeton with her husband, Raphael Allison, and their three children. “The distancing device of science fiction was helpful, and it changed the metaphors.”

Other poems in the collection are pointedly political. In a surreal section of “They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected,” a long poem about racism and bias, the victims of hate crimes write postcards to their assailants.

Ms. Smith was born in Massachusetts and grew up in Fairfield, Calif., the youngest of five children. Her father worked as an engineer at a nearby Air Force base. Her mother, who was a teacher, died of cancer when Ms. Smith was just out of college.