Seven years after his debut Counting Descent, Clint Smith releases his second poetry collection, Above Ground (Little, Brown), which reflects on how fatherhood has altered how he perceives and engages with the world. In between collections, he wrote the NYT-bestselling How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It was chosen as a common read at seven colleges and universities and as a President Obama favorite in 2021.
