As the nation’s new poet laureate, appointed in June by the Library of Congress, Tracy K. Smith set a goal: She would travel through the U.S. and explore poetry with people in rural and other communities that are overlooked and underserved by the festivals and book tours of the literary scene.

Her mission is not only to bring poetry to the people, as it were, but to visit with her fellow citizens, listening to their thoughts and feelings about the poems.

“Poetry allows you to start almost instantly talking about something really meaningful,” Smith said by phone from her office at Princeton University in New Jersey, where she is a professor of humanities and director of the creative writing program. “I’m just really eager to learn from the people I encounter and see where the conversation goes.”

Her inaugural trip was to New Mexico, where she gave a poetry reading at Cannon Air Force Base and visited Santa Fe Indian School, an autonomous school governed by 19 tribes. Next on her schedule are a rural African-American community in South Carolina and an opioid treatment center in rural Kentucky.

This week, Smith will travel to Hawaii for the first time, but her visit is not on her official agenda. The California-raised author whose third book, “Life on Mars” (Graywolf Press, 2012), won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, will appear Friday and Saturday as part of the Green Room, a literary salon and reading series presented by the Merwin Conservancy, a nonprofit organization founded by Maui resident and former Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin.

Smith plans to read and discuss some of her poems, including new work from “Wade in the Water,” her forthcoming collection, which is “rooted in events from American history and thinking in creative terms about notions of compassion.”

She also has been writing the libretto for an opera composed by Gregory Spears about the legacy of slavery in the American South. “It’s really about land and the ways that land and history are deeply interconnected, particularly in the African-American community,” said Smith, 45, whose parents and grandparents came from Alabama.

The opera, planned to debut at the Cincinnati Opera in 2020, is about families descended from slaves who live on the islands lying off Georgia and South Carolina, “where development has become so lucrative (and) there’s pressure on people to sell.”

SMITH ALSO may read work by poets who have inspired her, from Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney to Juan Felipe Herrera and Rita Dove. As a child, she read extensively and decided that she wanted to write.

“I feel lucky that I grew up with encouragement to read and books in the house and a lot of time. … Childhood wasn’t as overscheduled as it was now, and I remember long days sitting in this one blue chair and feeling like a whole world was being opened up to me.”

A childhood favorite was “The Diaries of Adam and Eve,” a slim novella by Mark Twain. Smith enjoyed “the wit and the beauty and perspective on gender and humanity that evolved in that fun book, and I wanted to be able to do that.” She recently bought a copy for her 8-year-old daughter — Smith and her husband, Raphael Allison, have three children — “and she had a similar feeling: astounded, drawn in.”

Asked about Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” and the controversy over its use of the “n-word” and portrayal of a runaway slave, she said: “I remember being inside of a child’s perspective and feeling hurt by the fact of that word, but also if I can look more broadly I feel like there’s a criticism and a reality that that novel is also enacting. The discomfort you feel when you encounter a work of art shouldn’t be a barrier.”

But it’s hard, she said. “I remember being one of one or two black kids in a class and feeling shy when the topic of slavery came up, but didn’t always feel help from the adults in the room.”

Recalling the questioning voice and unflinching gaze of another childhood favorite, Emily Dickinson, Smith’s metaphysical poetry examines space, science fiction, perception, mortality and time, and makes sudden leaps from the universal and theoretical to the personal and real.

A predominant image in her poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” is one of galaxies in a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. As Smith wrote it, she was grieving over the death of her father, an engineer, “and when I came to the end of the poem I remembered my dad had worked on the Hubble telescope.”

The telescope project had been part of her childhood, which included family picnics with her father’s co-workers. “It felt like a gift,” she said. “I really do believe that my dad just said, ‘Hello, try and just remember.’”

Smith will appear at 7 p.m. Friday at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center and 7 p.m. Saturday in the Doris Duke Theatre at the Honolulu Museum of Art.

While she’ll be here for only the weekend, Smith said she hopes to return to visit Hawaii communities and schools for her poet laureate program. In the meantime, she definitely plans to get in the water while here.