LONDON — Kate Tempest — poet, playwright, rapper, cross-genre talent — took to the stage at Electric Brixton, a club in the historically working class neighborhood one recent Sunday night, and looked into the crowd of more than a thousand people. “I don’t want to see you hidden behind your phone screens!” she called out in her unmistakable South London accent. “This is real! This is happening!” Being together in one room, living the same moment, she said, is “as close to connecting” as many of us ever achieve.

An insistence on connection and revealing quiet moments of beauty in the lives of Londoners — many of them struggling to stay afloat in economic uncertainty — is at the heart of Ms. Tempest’s work. Citing both the poet William Blake and the rapper RZA among her influences, she is a powerful mix of innocence and experience with a growing, and fervent, following.

“Her performances are incendiary,” said the singer Billy Bragg, who in 2010 invited her to participate in the Glastonbury performing arts festival. “She wasn’t just singing or rapping. She was telling you stuff like her life depended on your understanding what she was saying.”

After a breakthrough year in Britain, Ms. Tempest, 29, is taking her unusual blend of music and poetry to the United States, kicking off a two-month nationwide tour this month with performances in Los Angeles, the South by Southwest festival, and New York, where she will appear at the Mercury Lounge on March 24 and read at Word bookstore on March 26.