Clint Smith is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University and an Emerson Fellow at New America. His writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. His first full-length collection of poetry, Counting Descent, published in 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 Award. His debut nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed, which explores how different historical sites reckon with—or fail to reckon with—their relationship to the history of slavery, is forthcoming from Little, Brown. The reading will be followed by a Q&A session with Amanda Gorman, 2017 National Youth Poet Laureate.