Stephen A. Levin Family Dean's Forum: Poetry, Prose, and Reckoning with History: Clint Smith in Conversation With Mia Bay

The Stephen A. Levin Family Dean's Forum welcomes Clint Smith as this year's speaker. 

This event is free and open to the public. Doors will open at 3:30 p.m. Tickets are required.

Award-winning authors Clint Smith and Mia Bay talk about the presence of the past in the United States and how to contend with the nation’s history of slavery.
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Clint Smith is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a Number One New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of the March 2023 poetry collection Above Ground and of Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and his essays, poems, and scholarly writing have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere. He is a former National Poetry Slam champion and a recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review. Previously, Smith taught high school English in Prince George’s County, Maryland. He is the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History.

Mia Bay is a well-recognized scholar of late modern American intellectual and cultural history with a focus on African-American history. Her highly acclaimed books include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925. Her most recent, Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, received the Bancroft Prize and the Order of the Coif. She is a frequent consultant on museum and documentary film projects. Her recent public history work includes working with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) on one of its inaugural exhibits and serving a scholarly advisor to the Library of Congress and NMAAHC’s Civil Rights History Project.

The Stephen A.  Levin Family Dean's Forum is a celebration of the arts and sciences. Initiated in 1984, the Forum presents leading intellectual figures who exemplify the richness of the liberal arts. The Levin Family Dean’s Forum is made possible by a generous gift from Stephen A. Levin, C’67, in honor of his sons Eric T. Levin, C'92, and Andrew Levin, C'14.