Tracy K Smith and Jay Bernard

Tracy K. Smith is the 22nd Poet Laureate of the USA. Her last collection, Wade in the Water, was nominated for a Forward Prize; her last-but-one, Life on Mars, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Eternity, her Selected Poems, gathers together the best of her four books. Hilton Als has called her ‘a storyteller who loves to explore how the body can respond to a lover, to family, to history.’

Jay Bernard’s eagerly-awaited first collection, Surge, draws a line between the New Cross Fire of 1981 and the fire at Grenfell Tower. Bernard’s pamphlet, The Red and Yellow Nothing, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

The two poets read from and discussed their new collections.