I fell in love with the beautiful and inspiring spirit of Clint Smith (read his book, Counting Descent. He also is a deep wellspring of wisdom. What a gift to have him drop by and bless us with some poetry and his presence.

Clint Smith is a writer, teacher, and doctoral candidate in Education at Harvard University with a concentration in Culture, Institutions, and Society. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship with research interests that include mass incarceration, the sociology of race, and the history of U.S. inequality.

Previously, he taught high school English in Prince George’s County, Maryland where, in 2013, he was named the Christine D. Sarbanes Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Humanities Council. He has spoken at the 2015 TED Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, the U.S. Department of Education, the IB Conference of the Americas, and the Aspen Summit on Inequality and Opportunity.

He has been profiled in The Washington Post, NPR’s Here & Now, Vox, The Huffington Post, The Root, NBC News, PBS Newshour, and The Boston Globe. His two TED Talks, The Danger of Silence and How to Raise a Black Son in America, collectively have been viewed more than 5 million times.

Clint is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion, an Individual World Poetry Slam Finalist, a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop Fellow and has served as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. Department of State. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Educational Review and elsewhere.

His first full-length collection of poetry, Counting Descent, was published by Write Bloody Publishing in 2016 and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.