Awards

• Short-listed for National Book Awards (Nonfiction) 2021
• Winner of ALA Notable Books (Nonfiction) 2022

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9780316492935

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Reviews

Clint Smith has given us a new lens for seeing the spaces we inhabit, the stories they tell, and the people who tell those stories. How the Word is Passed sheds light on the contested narratives beneath the surface of our collective national identity, inviting us to dig a little deeper, reminding us never to take received histories for granted. --Eve Ewing, author of 1919 and Ghosts in the Schoolyard Clint Smith chronicles in vivid and meditative prose his travels to historical sites that are truth-telling or deceiving visitors about slavery. Humans enslaved Black people, and then too often enslaved history. But How the Word Is Passed frees history, frees humanity to reckon honestly with the legacy of slavery. We need this book. --Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Anti-Racist and Stamped from the Beginning

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Both an honoring and an expose of slavery's legacy in America and how this nation is built upon the experiences, blood, sweat and tears of the formerly enslaved. --The Root Part of what makes this book so brilliant is its bothandedness. It is both a searching historical work and a journalistic account of how these historic sites operate today. Its both carefully researched and lyrical. I mean Smith is a poet and the sentences in this book just are piercingly alive. And it's both extremely personal--it is the author's story--and extraordinarily sweeping. It amplifies lots of other voices. Past and present. Reading it I kept thinking about that great Alice Walker line 'All History is Current'. --John Green, New York Times bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed Sketches an impressive and deeply affecting human cartography of America's historical conscience...an extraordinary contribution to the way we understand ourselves. --Julian Lucas, New York Times Book Review The detail and depth of the storytelling is vivid and visceral, making history present and real. Equally commendable is the care and compassion shown to those Smith interviews -- whether tour guides or fellow visitors in these many spaces. Due to his care as an interviewer, the responses Smith elicits are resonant and powerful. . . . Smith deftly connects the past, hiding in plain sight, with today's lingering effects. --Hope Wabuke, NPR The summer's most visionary work of nonfiction is this radical reckoning with slavery, as represented in the nation's monuments, plantations, and landmarks. --Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire Raises questions that we must all address, without recourse to wishful thinking or the collective ignorance and willful denial that fuels white supremacy. --Martha Anne Toll, The Washington Post The power of an itinerant narrator--Smith journeys to Monticello, Angola Prison, Blandford Cemetery, and downtown Manhattan--is that it reveals slavery's expansive, geographical legacy. Smith tells his stories with the soul of a poet and the heart of an educator. --The Millions This isn't just a work of history, it's an intimate, active exploration of how we're still constructing and distorting our history. --Ron Charles, The Washington Post One of John Green's Two Favorite Books of the Year Washington Post Best Book to Read in June Time Best Book of Summer 2021 The Root's Book You Have to Read This Summer A Goodreads Hottest New Book of the Season One of Buzzfeed's New Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List ASAP

Named Most Anticipated Title of 2021 by Time The Millions The Rumpus Publishers Weekly Library Journal In reexamining neighborhoods, holidays and quotidian sites, Smith forces us to reconsider what we think we know about American history. --Time Clint Smith has given us a new lens for seeing the spaces we inhabit, the stories they tell, and the people who tell those stories. How the Word is Passed sheds light on the contested narratives beneath the surface of our collective national identity, inviting us to dig a little deeper, reminding us never to take received histories for granted. --Eve Ewing, author of 1919 and Ghosts in the Schoolyard Clint Smith chronicles in vivid and meditative prose his travels to historical sites that are truth-telling or deceiving visitors about slavery. Humans enslaved Black people, and then too often enslaved history. But How the Word Is Passed frees history, frees humanity to reckon honestly with the legacy of slavery. We need this book. --Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Anti-Racist and Stamped from the Beginning A work of moral force and humility, How the Word is Passed offers a compelling account of the history and memory of slavery in America. Writing from Confederate Army cemeteries, former plantations, modern-day prisons, and other historical sites, Clint Smith moves seamlessly been past and present, revealing how slavery is remembered and misremembered--and why it matters. Engaging and wise, this book combines history and reportage, poem and memoir. It is a deep lesson and a reckoning. --Matthew Desmond, Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology and author of Evicted ?A beautifully written, evocative, and timely meditation on the way slavery is commemorated in the United States. --Annette Gordon-Reed, Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard and Pultizer prize winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello

Author Information

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller and one of the New York Times Top Ten Books of 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent. The book 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 fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.

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