Dr. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. How the Word Is Passed was a number one New York Times bestseller and was named one of the ten best books of 2021 by the New York Times Book Review. Dr. Smith’s poetry collection, Counting Descent, won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He has received numerous awards and honors, including fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Emerson Collective, the Art for Justice Fund, and Cave Canem.

Dr. Smith’s essays, poems, and scholarly articles have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Paris Review, among others. He is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and a 2017 recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize for the American Poetry Review. He received his B.A. from Davidson College and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History and was previously a high school English teacher.

Dr. Smith is the eighth recipient of the Stowe Prize, following Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in 2011 for Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Michelle Alexander in 2013 for The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2015 for The Case for Reparations, Bryan Stevenson in 2017 for Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Matthew Desmond in 2018 for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Albert Woodfox in 2020 for Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement; My Story of Transformation and Hope, and Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. in 2021 for Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.