At the end of January 2018 I met Danez Smith in Manchester, before their event at the Anthony Burgess Centre that evening. Smith’s latest collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, had just been published in the UK, having already appeared in the US to much acclaim, where it was shortlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry. But Smith’s work (their latest and their 2014 debut {insert} boy) as well as two pamphlets of poems (hands on your knees and black movie) has not only been praised by reviewers and critics. Smith’s reputation is founded initially in live performance; their transatlantic visibility precedes them through a variety of online and print platforms as well as a huge social media following, all of which has created a community of poets and readers, something central to both their writing and live performance. Smith grew up in St Paul, Minnesota and became a fixture of the slam poetry scene — they are a 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam finalist and reigning two-time Rustbelt Individual Champion, as well as festival director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam. Smith currently co-hosts the popular Poetry Foundation podcast, VS. It is no surprise that Smith’s onstage charisma and passion exudes from work that is rooted both in the personal and in a community that extends well beyond their experiences as a black, queer American poet wrestling with a national legacy of violence.

As the event’s host, the poet Andrew McMillan, commented during the Q&A later that evening, from this side of the Atlantic it feels as though American poetry is going through a golden age: American poets (especially poets of colour) are fuelling a political collective consciousness and discourse around identity and equality. Smith is grateful for a British audience while also being humbly cautious about taking the spotlight from a UK poet of colour. They, like a number of Black American poets from Amiri Baraka to Claudia Rankine, are part of a crucial transatlantic conversation that must continue to converge as nativist rhetoric rages in both the US and the UK.

Smith begins their reading that evening by pointing out that any white British person in the audience who thinks they can exempt themselves from the horror of America’s racial violence is plainly wrong: the British ‘invented racism’. Certainly the American legacy of racism owes a lot to the British Empire, whose descendants Smith suggests would prefer to spectate, aghast, at the crimes of their former colony. Of course, the mostly white crowd sitting in this room are not the ones that need convincing. One hopes that they will do more than merely acknowledge their privilege, as described by Smith’s work repeatedly in relation to Black and queer bodies. Smith moves the audience to act, to laugh, applaud, respond, snap their fingers (some do) and interact with their voice on the stage. Momentarily, we become plural in the act of listening — a rare spirit of communalism against a shared pain rears up and dissipates, leaving us with a renewed sense of purpose. What Smith’s work gives us is an unwavering sense of responsibility for the survival of others and ourselves.