Clint Smith

Clint Smith – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Explore the life, career, and profound quotes of Clint Smith, an influential American writer, poet, and scholar. Discover his journey, his ideas, and his legacy in literature and social justice.

Introduction

Clint Smith (full name Clinton “Clint” Smith III), born August 25, 1988, is an American writer, poet, educator, and public intellectual whose works blend history, memory, race, and narrative. How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America became a New York Times #1 bestseller, winning critical acclaim and major awards.

Smith’s writing today resonates deeply in conversations about America’s past and present. He interrogates how stories are told, who is remembered, and how we reckon with collective memory — making him a critical voice in debates about race, justice, and education in the 21st century.

Early Life and Family

Clint Smith was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana.

During his formative years, Smith experienced the upheavals of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. His family eventually relocated, and Smith spent his senior year of high school attending Awty International School in Houston, Texas.

Smith’s upbringing in New Orleans, a city marked by deep ties to history, memory, and racial legacies, would later strongly inform his writing — particularly in How the Word Is Passed.

Youth and Education

Smith completed his early schooling in New Orleans (notably at Benjamin Franklin High School for the first three years) before moving for his final year. Davidson College in North Carolina, where he studied English and graduated in 2010.

He then matriculated at Harvard University, earning a master’s degree and ultimately a PhD in Education, focusing particularly on culture, institutions, and society, and exploring how children sentenced to life without parole experience educational programming while incarcerated.

During his academic trajectory, Smith also taught high school English in Prince George’s County, Maryland — an experience that grounded his concerns about education, equity, and narrative.

Career and Achievements

From Teaching to Literary Voice

Smith’s early professional path included teaching, and he was named Christine D. Sarbanes Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Humanities Council.

He was also active in spoken-word and slam poetry, joining the winning team at the 2014 National Poetry Slam. Counting Descent (2016), won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Awards.

Smith’s second major poetic work, Above Ground, was published in March 2023.

Breakthrough Nonfiction

But his wider influence came through nonfiction. In June 2021, Smith published How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, a deeply researched book tracing how monuments, museums, and memorials tell — or obscure — the history of slavery. National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (2021), the Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Nonfiction), the Stowe Prize, and the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism (2022) among them.

In addition, Smith longlisted for the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Smith also writes as a staff writer for The Atlantic, contributing essays and analyses on history, memory, racial justice, and political culture.

He also served as host of Crash Course’s Black American History video series from 2021 through 2022, broadening his reach in public education.

Smith has received numerous fellowships from organizations including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Emerson Collective, New America, Cave Canem, and more.

Honors and Recognition

His honors include:

• National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (2021)

• Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Nonfiction)

• Stowe Prize (2022)

• Hillman Prize for Book Journalism (2022)

• 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book (Counting Descent)

• Forbes “30 Under 30” (2018)

• Ebony's Power 100 list (2017)

Smith continues to work on new projects. One announced upcoming work aims to uncover untold stories of World War II in a non-fiction volume, Just Beneath the Soil.

Historical Milestones & Context

To understand Smith’s work is to understand several overlapping historical currents in America: the legacy of slavery, the evolution of public memory, racial justice movements, and contested national narratives. Smith’s nonfiction engages sites like Monticello, Angola prison (Louisiana State Penitentiary), Galveston, and others to trace how memory is memorialized or suppressed.

In How the Word Is Passed, he interrogates how different places handle their connections — or disconnections — to slavery. For example, he examines how certain memorials whitewash or sanitize that history, while others attempt honest confrontation.

Smith’s work sits alongside a renewed American reckoning with structural racism, the reexamination of monuments and memorials (e.g. Confederate statues), and debates about how history is taught in schools.

Thus, Smith not only writes about history but intervenes in how collective memory is shaped in present-day America.

Legacy and Influence

Clint Smith’s influence is already wide:

• Shaping public discourse on memory & race: His work contributes to conversations on how nations remember and reconcile with painful histories.

• Bridging academia and public readership: Smith writes with scholarly rigor but also accessibility, reaching broad audiences beyond strictly academic circles.

• Educational impact: Through his work with Crash Course and writing on education and incarceration, Smith’s voice enters classrooms and public pedagogy.

• Inspiring new writers: His combination of poetry and nonfiction encourages younger writers to see the possibilities of hybrid genres engaging meaning, moral urgency, and artistry.

• Cultural resonance: How the Word Is Passed has been banned or challenged in certain school districts — a sign of how much the book has provoked debates about whose histories are told.

In short, his legacy is already in formation: as a writer who demands both moral honesty and narrative craft, inviting readers to reckon with what we know, what we don’t, and how we choose to remember.

Personality and Talents

Smith is characterized by intellectual humility, moral urgency, and narrative empathy. His poetry often wrestles with the tension between personal memory and collective history. As he once said:

“I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts, and somewhere in between is memory…”

His teaching background gives him a grounding in how ideas meet lived lives — that sense of bridging theory and experience.

He’s also a devoted sports fan (Arsenal FC) and has written essays on soccer, showing his multifaceted intellectual interests.

In interviews and public dealings, Smith is often described as gracious, earnest, and unafraid to confront discomfort — to push readers to reexamine assumptions about race, power, and identity.

Famous Quotes of Clint Smith

Below is a selection of quotes by Clint Smith that encapsulate his thinking, voice, and concerns:

1. “To deny the full humanity of others is to deny it within ourselves.”

2. “It’s not a feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling of ‘discovered ignorance.’”

3. “We’re telling history by telling the full story, more of the story of everyone who lived here, not just certain people who were able to tell their stories.”

4. “When I think about the history of slavery and racism in this country, I think about how quick we are to espouse notions of progress without accounting for its uncertain and serpentine path.”

5. “A reporter did a human-interest piece on the Texas Rangers … The Ranger responded, ‘Because they don’t make a 46.’”

6. “That is the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights.”

7. “If you only hear one side of the story, at some point, you have to question who the writer is.”

These quotes reflect his deep concern with humanity, memory, narrative, and justice.

Lessons from Clint Smith

From Smith’s life and work, we can draw several lessons:

1. Be willing to question received narratives.
   Smith consistently challenges dominant historical narratives, urging us to look at what is omitted.

2. Embrace humility in learning.
   He speaks openly about ignorance and the work needed to understand others’ histories.

3. Bridge art and justice.
   His poetry and prose show that literary craft can be an instrument of moral reflection, not mere decoration.

4. Speak to both head and heart.
   Smith models writing that appeals to emotions and intellect simultaneously.

5. Persist through complexity.
   He does not seek easy answers, rather he leans into discomfort and paradox — an important lesson for anyone trying to reckon with hard truths.

Conclusion

Clint Smith is a bold and necessary voice in contemporary American letters. He stands at the intersection of poetry and history, of memory and justice, challenging us to reconsider how the past is told and how it shapes our present. His journey — from New Orleans to Harvard, from teacher to bestselling author — reflects a commitment to intellectual honesty and moral courage.

To explore more of his thought, you can read How the Word Is Passed, dive into his poetry collections, or follow his essays in The Atlantic. His work reminds us that history is not fixed, but a conversation, and how we tell that story matters deeply.