A poet who is down to earth

WITH influences as diverse as Séamus Heaney and David Bowie, African American poet, Tracy K Smith, will enthral audiences at the Cork World Book Fest, which runs at Triskel Christchurch from Apr 23-27.

Smith, who won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, for her third collection of poems, Life on Mars, has been selected to read, on Apr 27, by the Cork World Book Fest’s guest curator, Paul Muldoon.

Brooklyn-based Smith, aged 41, teaches at Princeton University, and is writing a memoir of her relationship with her mother, who died of cancer when Smith was 22.