How should we memorialize the darkest parts of our shared history?
Clint Smith
New America Fellowship
Through storytelling and education, Clint Smith is empowering communities to reckon with the legacy of slavery in the United States.
Clint Smith is an award-winning poet and educator whose writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and more. His first full-length collection of poetry, “Counting Descent,” was published in 2016 and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.
Clint is a former high school English teacher, and currently teaches writing in the Central Detention Facility in Washington, D.C. His two TED Talks, “The Danger of Silence,” and “How to Raise a Black Son in America,” have been collectively viewed more than seven million times.
As an Emerson Collective Fellow at New America, Clint will complete his forthcoming book, “How the Word Is Passed,” a work of narrative nonfiction examining how communities throughout the country reckon—or fail to reckon—with the history of slavery. It will be published in 2021 by Little, Brown.
