How Poetry and History Intersect with Clint Smith III

Foreign what's good, family?

How you guys doing out there?

Welcome, welcome, welcome to another episode of the Reader of Black Genius podcast where we learn about your favorite writers.

Favorite writers.

I'm your host, Derek Young, blurred extraordinaire and co owner of Mahogany Books.

This is again a reader of Black Genius podcast, part of the Mahogany Books Podcast network.

And before I really get to welcoming our guests, I have a bit of quick business to handle.

Real quick.

Today's show is of course sponsored by Mahogany Books.

Discover world of literature featuring black stories@mahogany books.com with the web's deepest collection of books written for, by or about people of the African diaspora.

You can enhance your reading experience with their curated collection of culturally enriching books.

And by using our coupon code Reader of Black Genius, you can support black owned businesses and promote representation and literature.

Visit mahoganybooks.com today and let your imagination take flight.

Remember, use our coupon code reader of Black genius to save 10% on your first purchase.

So I have the awesome opportunity to be able to sit down with this brother here, Clint Smith, incredible writer, poet and what I, from what I see, just a really good stand up God.

So I'm excited to have you here.

Welcome, Clint Smith.

If I have some sound effects, I would be playing it right now.

Welcome to the Weed of Black Genius podcast.

How you doing today?

I appreciate it, man.

It's, it's good to be here.

It's good to spend some time with you.

And you know, I'm, I'm a longtime fan of Mahogany.

So grateful for what y'all do in the dmv, in the sort of national landscape of books.

And so it's a pleasure to be here celebrating the work you all do and to be, you know, recording in the company of, of other writers who, whose work I admire so much.

Okay, well, I appreciate that this is, this is a very open and transparent with our listeners.

They know that I am new to the hosting thing, to the being out front, talking to people thing.

Usually when people see us out in the community, they know that my wife Ramonda, my partner, is the face of the business.

She makes everyone feels welcomed and she's magnetic and I'm the one that's hiding in the corner just trying to like hand the books out and stuff like that.

So this conversation is, I'm looking forward to because one, I want to get to know more about you.

But more than anything, I'm really excited to hear about you sharing your story with our listeners because I think it will be just another example of you know, putting your mind to something and accomplishing your goals.

Right.

Just how books have been influential and then how you can in turn, you know, use the things that you've learned, your.

Use your talents to impact and make people empower other people.

Because as soon as your.

Your.

Your first.

Your book hit, and even the poetry, I think people just really feel connected to you and your work.

So that's why, you know, why I asked you to join us on the Reader of Black Genius podcast.

So let's just kind of start there.

Who are you?

Where are you from?

Let's give people some background on Clint Smith, and, you know, we'll kind of start a conversation from there.

Yeah, I.

I'm Clint.

I was born and raised in New Orleans.

And growing up, I.

I loved writing, I loved poetry, I loved reading.

And I remember the first poem that I wrote was a poem that I wrote in my third grade teacher's class, Ms.

Mueller, and she signed us to write a poem about color.

She was like, select a color and write a poem about that color.

And I selected the color gray.

I don't know why.

I was a strange child.

And the poem was like, I hate the color gray.

It reminds me of a rainy day gray.

I really hate that color.

It's annoying.

Like, my little brother and I wrote that poem, and me and my brother, we have a great relationship now.

He was a toddler.

Every child is annoying.

But I remember wrote that poem.

Ms.

Mueller came over to me and she.

She looked over my shoulder, looked down at the poem, and she sort of was like, mouthing it to herself as she was reading it.

And then she turned to me, she put her hand on my shoulder, and she was like, clint, that was beautiful.

You could really be a writer when you grow up.

For all I know, she could have gone and told that to every kid in the class.

She could have gone one by one and told them the same thing, and I would never know.

But I remembered that moment for the rest of my life.

And it's not to say that that creates some very neat, linear relationship between, like, Ms.

Mueller told me this in third grade, and that's how I became an author.

But it is something that existed in my consciousness, I think, even when I wasn't necessarily cognizant of it.

And it's a story that I tell teachers all the time, because you truly have no idea how the things you say will impact a young person for the rest of their lives.

And especially you now.

Like, it's so hard to tell.

You know, I was A teacher.

I taught high school in Prince George's county for a few years before I went to grad school.

And.

And it's tough.

Like, you, you know, whether it's a third grader or a teenager, you don't always know that if what you're conveying and what you're trying to share, what you're saying is resonating is.

Is.

Is.

Is settling in to their own consciousness.

But.

But young people hear you even when you can't really tell that they.

They're paying attention.

And I.

That moment stayed with me for so long.

And there are also things that teachers have said, negative things teachers have said that have also stayed with me for a long time that they might have said as an offhanded comment that they might not even have recognized, that they might have forgotten they said right after.

And so I always tell educators and.

And that's relevant for parents, too, but, like, you just never know what.

How.

What you say, whether it's affirmation or defamation, is gonna stay with a young person.

So.

So that was my earliest experience, sort of not even necessarily putting writing out into the world, but having somebody read what I wrote.

And I, you know, throughout the rest of school, are kind of.

I was really interested in sports journalism.

I always watched, you know, like, Sports center and Pardon the Interruption, and I was like, oh, that would be fun to, like, have a job where you talk about sports.

But that was my backup plan because I always thought that I was going to grow up and be a professional soccer player.

I was like, I'm going to grow up, be a professional soccer player.

I love the Arsenal team of the early 2000s.

Thierry Henry.

It's a British soccer team out in London.

Tierra Henry is this famous black French player who helped lead France to the World cup in 1998.

And the.

And.

And he is someone who played for Arsenal, who I admired so long.

And so I grew up playing in a place where there weren't many other black kids who played soccer in.

In Southern Louisiana.

And so for me to see this person who looked like me, who was.

Who was, you know, one of the best players in the world, was.

I had his poster up in my room.

I had his jersey up in my room.

I.

I was obsessed.

And.

And I really thought I would be a professional soccer player until you grow up and realize that Louisiana is not a hotbed of soccer talent against which to compare your skills on a.

On a sort of global level.

And so I ended up not having my journey not take that trajectory because I Didn't necessarily grow up with the infrastructure to support such a dream.

But my senior year of high school was Hurricane Katrina.

And so I left New Orleans, went to Houston, Texas, finished high school in Houston, and ultimately ended up at Davidson College in North Carolina.

And I did play on the soccer team there, but.

But I didn't get a lot of playing time.

And it became this sort of like 18, 19 year old existential crisis where this thing that had defined me for so long, like for so much of my life, I was Clint the soccer player, Clint the soccer guy.

You know, in.

In high school, I was like, all state, all city, all metro, led our team to a state championship.

But.

But again, then you come and you're competing against kids from New York and California and Texas and these sort of much bigger soccer landscapes.

And I.

I didn't get a lot playing time.

And that was really hard for me because I had to figure out who I was and what I cared about off the field.

And it's in that moment that I kind of came back to writing in.

In a little bit of a full circle way.

In 2008, I had a internship in New York City.

I was working for a publishing company up there, and I had a friend who was a fellow intern who was like, you know, Clint, I'm gonna go to this spot called the New York and Poets Cafe down on the Lower east side of Manhattan.

And I was like, the Nuyorican Post Cafe.

Like, what is the.

What what?

Like, I don't know what that is.

What are you talking about?

I was like, Mission Impossible 2 is out.

We should go see that Tom Cruise movie.

And she was like, ooh, you're whack.

Like, be quiet, you know, on the train.

So she dragged me on the train.

We went down to the Nuyorican.

For those who are unfamiliar, the Nuyorican is like this legendary poetry spot in lower Manhattan.

Just so many literary geniuses and luminaries have come through there.

But I wasn't.

I wasn't really hip to, to that world at that point.

And I remember I went in there and people were like drinking from the bar.

They were doing the Electric Slide.

Like, Biggie and Pac were playing like the 90s hip hop bell bib devoe.

Like, it was.

I was like, this is a poetry spot.

Like, what is unlike any poetry that I had encountered before.

And.

And I remember then the poem started.

Mahogany Brown was the host.

Oh, yeah, you know, incredible poet, incredible human.

And.

And then the way she commanded the room was just like, again, Unlike anything I had ever seen.

And then the poets came on stage and they started doing these poems.

And I remember this one person came on stage and did this poem about living with cerebral palsy.

And she did this poem.

And in three minutes, the way I thought about an entire demographic of people completely changed.

Like, I left that room never thinking about disability the same way that I had thought about it when I walked into that room.

And.

And I remember I left that night and I was like, I don't know what this thing is, but like, I want to do this.

And so I went back to Davidson where, you know, I was this sort of having my identity crisis as a, you know, former soccer player.

I was still on the team, but, you know, wasn't getting any run and.

And I started a poetry group at Davidson.

And so I started a poetry group and we started getting together in the sort of basement in the library and our main academic building on Sunday nights.

And it was our kind of like little dead poet society thing, you know, where we would like, read poems and watch poems and workshop poems.

And we went to the Cupsy, the college spoken Slam poetry competition.

We got rocked, but like, it was so fun and it was cool because it was, you know, Davidson's this tiny little school in North Carolina.

It was like less than 2,000 people.

You know, we had physics majors, you know, math majors, chemistry majors, English majors, all these folks from athletes, non athletes, theater kids, like, and it was like 12 of us and we all came together.

It was such a.

It was a group that would have come together and I almost feel like no other context, but it was this beautiful space.

And so that's, you know, that's when I started like, really trying to write in earnest and, you know, was writing a lot of poems.

Like, Charlotte had an incredible spoken word scene.

So I would go to Slam Charlotte all the time and.

And just kind of became obsessed with the art form and graduated from Davidson, lived in South Africa for a year doing work around hiv, AIDS and tuberculosis and public health.

Stuff was.

They have a really vibrant spoken word and art scene down there in Johannesburg where I lived, was immersed in that came back, was a teacher in Prince George's county and was sort of like teacher by day, poet by night.

I was on the DC Slam team with, you know, folks like G.

Yamazawa, Elizabeth Acevedo pages, Matam Amin Dalal, just writers who, who were my, my friends and my, you know, it was.

It's like slam is this little micro culture where it's like, it feels so huge to you.

I remember the National Poetry Slam felt like the Super Bowl.

And you realize, you know, even if those.

This small community, it has this outsized impact on my life.

And so I was on the DC Slam team for three years, and.

And that was amazing.

And we won the national poetry slam in 2014.

And I went to grad school up at Harvard to get my PhD in Sociology of Education in 2014.

I was there from 2014 to 2020 and was thinking a lot about the relationship between education, incarceration.

I worked in prisons up in Massachusetts while I was there, and then when I moved to D.C.

worked in D.C.

jail.

My dissertation was on the how young people sentenced to life without parole make meaning of the purpose of education while they're incarcerated.

And then while I was doing that, I was.

I published a book of poetry, which I was kind of doing on the side.

Had transitioned from writing, you know, from this for the stage, so to speak.

And, like, also thinking about what that work looked like on the page.

Not that they're mutually exclusive, but I published a book, Poetry, in 2016, and started thinking a lot about, you know, as I was beginning my dissertation.

Also had another idea.

Thinking about public history and public memory as we were watching these Confederate statues come down.

And I've been talking for a while, but yeah.

And that's.

And then I graduated in 2020, and now I'm a staff writer at the Atlantic and trying to write these books.

Well, I mean, all that is fantastic.

I appreciate it.

There's a lot there that I kind of want to swing back to and touch on.

But the first thing I want to make sure.

What was your major at Davidson?

Like, what did you.

When you went there?

What did you say?

Okay, this is why I'm a major in something that says a lot for.

Yeah, well, I went there and I thought it was going to be an econ major because that seemed like a.

Like, a sensible thing to do, like, oh, major in economics.

You know, like, that feels like a.

A useful skill set.

And then I failed my econ class.

And so then I was like, I don't want to be an econ major anymore.

And so I failed Econ101.

And it's so funny because I got a note from.

From the professor who.

Who failed me.

That's back in, what, 2006.

And he sent me a note last.

Late last year that was just like, I read all your books.

I'm so thrilled for all your success.

This is amazing.

I always knew there was something special about you, and I Was like, did you know there was something special about me?

You gave me a.

You gave me an F in your class, man.

I never failed a class in my life until my freshman year at Econ.

It was a humbling experience.

But, no, I.

And then I decided to be an English major.

Okay.

And we're talking about teachers and affirmation.

There was a.

A professor there who.

Who, in the sort of writing composition class that we all had to take, I wrote a piece about.

It was about Katrina, and it was about, like, Katrina and Mardi Gras and.

And sort of this nostalgic sort of reflection on.

On the.

This sort of micro.

Using Marty Gro as a sort of microcosm to think about, you know, what I missed about New Orleans.

And I wasn't.

You know, I was like, I.

I was a little confused.

I didn't know what I was going to major in.

But.

But Gil Holland, you know, he was.

He was kind of like Santa Claus.

He was this jolly old man.

He had round belly, huge gray beard.

And.

And Professor Gil Holland, he pulled me aside after class one day, and he was like, clint, you're such an incredible writer.

I want to see.

Like, I would love to see you do more of this.

And.

And again, you know, I'm 18 at that point, so.

The same way when Ms.

Mueller said you could be a writer when you grow up, Gil Holland, when I was 18, told me that I was an incredible writer.

And I was like, oh, okay, that feels good.

Like, you know, and it was the sort of nudge that made me think that that could.

Could be a thing in my life.

And so I was like, let me be an English major, see what this is like.

And, you know, again, those two moments at different periods of my life, I don't.

Again, it's not.

I don't want to create this sort of false impression that, like, those are the moments that I knew.

But.

But when people insert those.

That sort of affirmation into your.

Your spirit, I think it plays a huge role in the trajectory, that of decisions that you end up going on to make.

No.

100.

And it's like, I.

I always reflect back.

I'm a very introspective person, so I'm always reflecting back on the decisions made and decisions not made.

Right?

And even some of the.

I'm not sure where.

But moments that change your outlook.

So, for example, I tell this story all the time.

I thought I was gonna be an architect like that from, I mean, middle school through high school, the plan was to be an architect I took one class, I took physics, and it changed everything for me.

Like, I joked with.

I was talking to a friend of ours this past Saturday.

He's an architect, and he was like, well, yeah, because he barely got through physics as well.

But that one class told me this was not the path for me, right?

And I had to recalibrate.

And at the end of it, I knew, well, I always wanted to own my own business, so I went to business route.

But these little instances, whether it's something that you experience, right, Something that says, you know, this net.

This isn't necessarily your, your skill set, this isn't your, your talent area or persons speaking into you, right, in those moments.

So even those words, and maybe they aren't the words that you wrote down, but words that someone spoken to you, how they impact, right?

And I love the fact that you're saying you share this with teachers all the time because it's something that they have to be very cognizant of because it does either fills a person up or drains them of their spirit and their fight to want to, you know, hope, aspire for something bigger or better.

So I'm.

Yeah, I'm 100 there with you, and I, I.

So I appreciate the story because again, that's what I was alluding to in the beginning.

Your story, I think it just reaffirms what people know.

Like, they, they kind of understand in the back of their head.

But to hear it from a person who has accomplished this thing that they look at him like, oh, my goodness, I can never do what he does.

I can never do what she does.

And then to hear how these moments or some struggles are similar to what they've experienced, right?

It kind of normalizes those moments for them and give them, I guess, I think, better perspective on, on a lot of that.

So, I mean, I think it's essential to talk about.

I mean, I, you know, it's.

It's so easy, especially in the age of social media, to, to create us, to, to project stories onto people's lives that make it.

Everything seem neat and, and linear.

And they did this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing and, and their, you know, life and career has been amazing.

You can project that onto somebody and somebody can, can curate, you know, the, the way that they present what's happening in their life.

And it's, It's a tricky thing because it's not to say that everybody should.

That if you post an Instagram thing on, like, how excited you are to graduate from college, that you also have to post an Instagram thing about when you're experiencing depressive episodes.

I don't.

I don't know that that's the solution necessarily, but I think that part of the nature of the medium is one in which we have to understand the context that.

That shapes it.

Right.

And so.

But, you know, to.

To some degree, you know, I.

I try to be a pretty private person on some level because I want to protect my family and.

And, you know, I'm.

There are some things that I think are important to keep to yourself, but.

But I also try to be clear about, on a professional level, at least about the moments in which my career has not been this neat, clean, you know, unencumbered journey.

You know, I.

The same way that, you know, I failed my econ class my freshman year of college, had a pretty terrible gpa.

You know, I was.

Didn't this thing that mattered more to me than anything, being on the soccer team.

I, like, didn't get any playing time.

That was really hard when in grad school, even, you know, I failed my comprehensive exams when I.

In the middle of my PhD program.

And so I.

And if you fail them twice, you're kicked out of the program.

And so I, you know, I failed the first time this.

Why passed one section that failed this other section, but you have to pass both.

And it was a scary moment for me because I was three years into this PhD program.

You know, I.

I'm This.

I'm at Harvard.

Like, there's a lot of things that people project onto that it becomes really tied to your identity.

You know, I was getting a lot of bylines from different places.

I started to write for.

In.

In part because I was a graduate student at this prestigious university.

And so it was a scary thing to be in a.

In a moment in which I was like, I have, you know, two months to study to take this thing again, and if I don't pass, like, I'm gonna get kicked out of this program.

And then.

And then, you know, I.

Same way I had an existential crisis around soccer when I was 18, you know, it probably would have been another existential crisis.

Know, when I was, you know, in my late 20s, trying to figure out if I'm kicked out of this program, what.

What do I do?

You know, what sort of decisions do I make?

And I.

I do think it's to.

I.

I think it's important to some extent to share those moments, as you said, because it's not an easy, simple journey in.

And that can be professionally that can be.

Personally, your professional life can look amazing and then your personal life can be in shambles.

I mean, everybody, all kind of stuff.

But to the extent that I, I can, you know, I try to, I try to share those moments with folks too, especially with students and with young people who, who I think, you know, need to know about how hard the journey can be.

And, and I think that's an important part of especially being a writer.

You know, what you see in the, the book, the finished product is, is the manifestation of like a lot of, you know, three steps forward and four steps backwards, and four steps forward and two steps backwards.

It's, it's, it's uneven, it's difficult.

But, but it's important to be honest about how.

Yeah, it's just, it's not, it's not straightforward all the time.

Yeah, I mean, I love that last piece there because I dabbled at poetry when I was in college.

And what you just said there feels like a metaphor around book writing because the thing that we don't take into consideration is there's an editor that is with you throughout the entire process that gets you to the finish line.

So, yes, there's a huge component of that that is you as the writer.

Right.

The visionary laying that out.

But you have an editor, you have an entire team that's sitting there working with you to help mold it into this New York Times number one best selling book.

Right.

So you get how the world has passed.

People like, oh, this dude is just a genius.

Like, we never thought we needed this information, but in reality it was Clint Smith plus some people.

Right.

And that required.

That is the actual finished project.

It has your name on it, but we look on the inside.

There are other people who help contribute to that thing.

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, you know, Vanessa Mobley, who's my editor of that book.

I mean, that this book doesn't happen without her.

You know, this was.

I was finishing the book during the pandemic, the early days of pandemic, and you know, we had these sort of marathon zoom sessions where we were going over the book line by line discussing like, what, you know, it was just a level, like a fine tooth comb going over it with a level of detail that I'm just, I will forever be so grateful for.

You know, my wife, she, she read the first draft of this book and gave feedback that, you know, was, was invaluable and, and in this book wouldn't be what it is without her.

And, and, you know, and there's so many, you know, I had other friends who read it, obviously, the copy editing team, incredible fact checker.

And so many people, as you said, who made it a team effort.

And even beyond that, you know, another thing that I always try to talk to young writers about is, you know, in how the word is passed, obviously, you know, because you were, I think, what's today?

June 3rd.

So this is the three year.

It came out three years ago this week.

And it.

That book changed my life in ways that I'm still getting used to and in ways that still feel very surreal for me.

But that book was probably twice as long.

I wrote probably twice as many words as are in that book and had to cut a lot of what was in that book because it.

It wasn't good.

And like, even in the sort of leading up to it, I probably wrote like 50,000 words over the course of a year, a year and a half of what I thought was going to be the first chapter of that book.

And then I was like, oh, no, this isn't good enough.

And then I tried again, and I was like, no, this isn't good enough.

And then I tried again, and I was like, oh, no, this isn't good enough.

And so it was a year and a half of writing words that never ended up in the book.

But I had to write all those words to get to what ultimately was the first word of the book, right?

So, like, I had to do the work of sort of excavation.

I had to do the work of.

Of, you know, writing is a mechanism.

It's a.

It's a way of thinking.

You're thinking on the page, you're exploring on the page.

And I think sometimes people sit down to write, and if they feel like they don't write, you know, an incredible sentence, an incredible page, an incredible chapter the first time around, that it's a failure.

And they're not meant to be a writer.

But, you know, it's interesting that we think about it that way because we don't think about that in the cont.

We don't think about things like that in the context of other parts of our life.

You know, nobody gets on a basketball court and immediately thinks that going to be Steph Curry, you know, that you're going to, you know, drop 30 points and have a triple double.

You have to.

You have to get on the court and you got to practice, and you put in hours and hours and hours in the gym that people never see.

But you do it so that when people come to the game, when you show up to the game, that is the manifestation of the unseen work you have put in.

When you are a, a musician, you don't just show up to the concert and play like Coltrane or Bach.

Like you got to put in hours and hours and hours of work that people never see.

That is ugly.

That's with you, you know, playing the wrong sound with your instrument out of tune with you, you know, with it of you putting in practice time that is necessary so that when you show up to the recital, you show up to the concert, people are seeing the manifestation of that work.

And writing is the same thing.

How the word is passed doesn't show up as a book, as a finished product at the very beginning you got to put in.

For me, it's the same thing.

Like, and maybe it comes from having been an athlete my whole life where I know that like you put in mo.

The vast majority of the time you spend playing that sport is stuff that is not in the game, right?

It's stuff that you are practicing so that what happens in the game is successful.

And writing is the same thing.

Like I, I wrote all those words over the course of a year and a half in a way that it wasn't a waste of time.

It was the practice that I had to put in.

It was the work that I had to put in to get to what would ultimately end up in the book.

And I think that's the frame that I, I used to think about now, you know, in the.

It's the same with my poetry books.

You know, my first book, counting descent in 2016, I mean there was what, maybe 50 something poems in there and I wrote probably like 500 poems to get to those 50, you know, and so it just is, that's just part of the, the process and, and one that I think is, is inherent to, to what it means to be a writer.

And so that's what I was gonna go to next.

I know we're gonna, I'm gonna do a quick back track a little bit and touch on if there were any books during your teen and colle really kind of stood out to you to help you formulate, you know, this mindset.

But one of the things that kind of jumps out at me is.

Your.

Identity as maybe a poet first because it was very interesting.

So like I'm thinking of this like non fiction writer, this thinker when this book comes out, right?

Like that's my introduction to you, right, as a writer.

Not knowing that you had this experience, this, this identity like of years as a poet first, right?

Slam you Know.

Right.

You know, being out there with Elizabeth Acevedo, like, some of these things, it.

Like, I don't think people would necessarily connect that with you first, but I.

As I listen to you talk about excavation and the work that you put in when writing, it's a.

To me, it's a very poet thing.

Right.

When I talk to other poets, when I read poetry.

Right.

When I've attempted to write poetry myself, it is an exploration.

Right.

Because what you're doing is you're telling this story in these finite number of words, and the goal is to elicit a emotional response, is to get people thinking.

And to me, it feels like part of that thought process may have been cultivated because of your time as, you know, like, really leaning into poetry as a writer, as a performer, as a, you know, author.

If.

So, am I seeing something there that's not there, or.

I'm just.

I'm curious.

Yeah.

You know, I.

Poetry is certainly the form that I came to first.

It is the genre that I think molded me into a writer.

And I think I.

It's just interesting because slam was the first sort of literary space that I began to occupy.

And for me, what that meant was that one, my notion of being a writer was deeply tied to community.

There wasn't this idea of, like, writing being this very isolated, lonely experience because I was at open mics every night, I was at slams every night.

And all that whole thing is about community.

It's about the space.

It's about the support that, you know, writers are providing one another.

And, you know, so kid in my early 20s here in D.C.

you know, going to bus boys, going to, you know, the open mics by.

By how we're going to, you know, open mics that people would hold in, like, their basement, you know, and so much of those beautiful moments were, you know, there was obviously, like, you know, there's the bus boys, and there was what was then the Beltway poetry slam and.

And the sort of bigger stuff like that.

But it was also these intimate moments where, like, people just have folks sitting in their living room or sitting in their basement, sitting on their porch.

And it was just a special.

It was a really special time.

And so it was both grounded in community and also the.

The editorial experience of slam is interesting because you write something and you get immediate feedback about whether it's like.

Like hidden or not.

And obviously, art is subjective.

And, like, you might read a poem in one environment that does well and then another environment that doesn't.

There are all sorts of factors, but but it's interesting because I gave me a sort of like editorial ear for myself in some ways, in an early way, in ways that I'm, I'm really grateful for and just because you can kind of get a sense of like, okay, what things are working, what things are not, what sort of things themes are resonating, what themes are.

And, and so, but, but to your point about excavation.

Yeah.

I mean for me the poetry is both the creation of art but also the mechanism through which I do my best thinking.

And it is, it is the, it is the process of attempting to dig into my interior self and sort of unpack things that I, it is a space of reflection.

Right.

And so when I sit down to write a poem that is about, you know, thinking about my relationship with my father, the very nature of like, what it means to like put my phone to the side, sit down and try to write something about, that means that I am thinking about it and, and creating the space through with which to meditate on it in a way that might not otherwise happen, certainly wouldn't happen.

Maybe if people, you know, if they're journalers or write diaries, maybe it's a similar sort of phenomenon, but I had never been that kind of person.

So the poem almost became the journaling.

The poem became how I captured my, and explored my relationship to myself, my relationship to my family, my relationship to my history.

And, and I think that that poetry for me is, I've said this before, but it's the act of paying attention.

And that can be paying attention in an interior sense or paying attention to the external world, paying attention to what's in front of you, paying attention to what's behind you.

And, and it just, it slows you down.

It slows me down and it forces me to look and to engage with a different level of intentionality.

And I think because of that intentionality there is a sort of inherent within that is a sort of natural excavation that happens and an attention to detail that I think is, is really present in my non fiction work too.

You know, my favorite poets are people who, who capture something about like a physical object or, or, or a feeling.

You know, when you write, read somebody who, they say something and you're like, oh, that is what that looks like.

But I've never had the language to describe it that way, or that is what that feels like.

But I never had the language to describe it that way.

And so I try to bring that sensibility as much as possible to, to my non fiction work as well.

Like paying attention to the sensory experience in one's body, paying attention to the sensory experience in the outside world.

What, what things look like, what they smell like, what they, what it tastes like, what it feels like when it hits your skin, what it sounds like when you walk across the wood.

Those things matter a lot to me.

And, and so in poetry certainly informs my, my non fiction work in a huge way.

Right.

I, I wonder.

Absolutely love that because one of the.

And it's something I think I've come to realize somewhat recently within like the last two or three years is, you know, I've read some phenomenal, phenomenal books.

Things that really open my eyes to things.

But what I've noticed with some of the books I've read recently is, and maybe it's the maturity that I'm, you know, experiencing now is the language it gives me to be more in touch with myself, to like open up doors to what it is that I'm really feeling or aching about, to be able to really address that thing.

So I love that you are bringing that out for people's attention because that's the part of books for me in the last few years that has really helped me to be more in touch with what I'm feeling and to be able to then be in communication with people, my family, my wife, my team, to be able to say, hey, so we are hopefully in better communication that you understand where I'm coming from.

More better.

This is actually the word.

Right.

That I'm been trying to say for like the last 10 years.

And then they're like, oh, okay, that makes more sense, right?

So I, that like I, that I really wanted to put a pin in that and like call that out because that is for me, I know it's something that I've.

Has been really important to me in the last few years.

And to hear you say that as a writer is like just.

I think that's reaffirming for me to hear that because that's something that I've definitely been experiencing myself.

So.

Yeah, but let's do this.

I want to go back a little bit because it's been for me a phenomenal conversation.

So I hope everyone out there who's listening is enjoying it as well.

Definitely has some great nuggets for myself, but I want to go back to teen years, college years as you was dealing with, you know, trying to figure out how to become the next Mbappe, right?

Because I, I love that.

Right?

I'm, I'm like, dude, I grew up.

It was sock.

It was football and basketball.

My mom made me play soccer because she didn't want me getting hit because I was a skinny little thing, right.

But it was never soccer for me.

So I love the fact that, right, that was your.

Your.

Your.

That was your focus.

You played it in college.

And I.

I heard the.

I'mma call.

Call you out on the bias.

You brought up Steph Curry, right.

There's millions of other basketball players you could have said in that moment, but, you know, you gonna go to your Davidson homeboy.

My classmate, man, that's my guy.

All right, all right.

We won't let that pass.

But, you know, I do want to make sure I call out the bias there.

But were there any books?

So.

Right, so you're.

So you're.

You're writing poetry.

You created an organization there to, you know, get other people into it.

You're out, you know, now performing.

But was there any books during that time?

Whether it's poetry books or fiction, whatever it was that you read, that kind of, like, it stopped you?

And this is like, the feeling I want to maybe put into my writing or whatever it was.

I'm just curious.

Where were some of those, you know, you reading Black genius in the book moments that made you stop and pay attention?

I was thinking about this before I came on.

And you.

I think I'd have to go a little bit before college time.

I was really, excuse me, impacted by the work of Walter D.

Myers as a young person.

His work.

It.

He was writing for young black kids.

And.

And specifically, I think it's safe to say, black boys in a way that I had never encountered before.

And.

And both he.

I'd say both him and Jackie Woodson's work.

So I think Jackie Woodson's book, like Miracles Boys, which came out when I was maybe 12 or 13, and then Walter Dean Myers books.

He had these books about basketball, slam hoop that he wrote.

He was so prolific.

But those in particular, like, as.

As a young athlete reading about sports.

But it.

You know, but the books were.

They were ostensibly about sports, but, like, the sports were just the entry point through which we were examining the lives and the reflections and the fears and the anxieties and the.

The joys of.

Of these young black boys growing up in.

In a range of different environments, some that were like the environment that I grew up in, and.

And some that were very different.

And I think there was.

The.

What I liked was experiencing early iterations, and I might.

I don't think I had the language to name it as such at this time, but like, different versions of.

Of, like, what black, Young, black masculinity could look like.

Because if you think about the characters in some of Walter D.

Myers books or Jackie Woodson's books or Mildred Taylor's books, you're finding so many different examples of what black boyhood is like, of what black childhood is like.

And I think in a moment where I was feeling a level of, like, social.

The sort of.

In the larger cultural landscape, you know, this is in the 90s and the early 2000s, feeling as if there was one archetype of what black masculinity was supposed to look like, of who black boys were supposed to be, how we were supposed to dress, how we were supposed to talk, what sports we were supposed to play, what things we were supposed to do and not do.

The.

The ecosystem feels much more vast and pluralistic and beautiful now.

I mean, you'll see, you see black kids who dress all kind of ways, listen to all kind of music, do all kind of things, and it's always been that way.

But I think there's more space in the sort of, you know, in the discourse.

There's more space in the cultural ecosystem in which people can feel like they can be.

Be their fullest selves and not feel as if they have to fit into a narrow sort of myopic conception of what black masculinity looks like.

And so I think those books, as a young person that showed me different models of.

Of young black masculinity were really important to me, even when I didn't necessarily have the language to name them as such or name.

Name that feeling that way at that time.

And.

And then I would say, you know, going into college, there's a class that I took with a woman named Brenda Flanagan, and we read the sort of Norton African American.

It was an African American literature class.

And the Norton African American Literature Anthology was the sort of bible of that class.

And it was just the first time I had taken an African American literature course.

And it just gave me.

It introduced me to so many writers who.

Whose work I would spend more time with later.

But it was like those early taste, those first, Earliest taste of, you know, folks from, like, the Harlem Renaissance era, of folks who.

Who were writing, you know, of the.

Of the Zora Neale Hurston's, of the Langston Hughes's, of the Elaine Lockes, of the claw McKay's, of the Paul Dunbars, and.

And helped put them in conversation with one another in a way that I found really helpful.

And again, this.

It's a Group of people whose, you know, like Countee Cullen's conception of.

Of black life and Langston Hughes's conception of black life and Du Bois's conception of black life and Zora's conception of black life were all very different than one another.

And so, you know, sometimes we're presented with the Harlem Renaissance as being like a sort of monolithic, homogeneous entity.

But.

Yeah, but the beautiful thing that I learned in that class is all of the sort of the pluralism that existed within black life even in this, you know, in the 1920s and 30s, that was reflected in the literature, in the public conversations and the disagreements that in the beef that these folks had.

Right.

Like, I mean, you think about.

I think about Langston Hughes is Negro artists in the racial mountain, which is basically like a diss track to County Cullen.

And.

And it's just.

But it's so fascinating, right, because you forget sometimes when you study these folks in isolation that they were actually like in community with each other, that they like, loved each other or hated each other or slept with each other or, you know, it was all over the place.

And that, that for me was.

Was again another moment in which like, oh, there are lots of ways to tell the story of black life and, and lots of approaches to, to take in doing so.

So, you know, in my teenage adolescent years, I would say those couple writers and then the entire Norton anthology and specifically the focus on those sort of writers of the early 20th century were really meaningful to me.

Okay.

Okay.

I love that.

I mean, what's.

It's amazing the number of people specifically, specifically black male writers that I talk to, interview or just like when we're before, after an event and we're just talking number of them that talk about Walter Dean Myers.

Right.

And the impact either his work had on them or his mentorship had on them.

Right.

And I didn't come across.

Those weren't books that I were.

I was introduced to.

I was reading like choose your own adventure as my choice of fiction type stuff comics or like when my mom gave me something was a nonfiction, you know, visible.

Well, not visible, so.

But, you know, the classics, right.

Like more heady, like usually like high school adult level books that she was bring into my presence.

So I didn't have that type of relationship with Walter D.

Myers, the writer.

Right.

With his work at that age.

So it's.

I always find it interesting.

I wonder, like, man, what if I had of.

I wonder how I would have felt reading his work at, you know, that age.

But I.

I'm always like, that's a name that continue continuously rings across a vast variety of, you know, writers I talk to that.

He's one of those people that really had a huge fingerprint on their youth.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think he.

Unfortunately, the unfortunate end of that is that there at that period of time, there just weren't many other black men writing specifically.

Specifically for.

With protagonists who were young black boys.

It just was not.

Not present.

You know, he's writing in the, I guess, you know, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and.

And it was a rarity.

And.

And, you know, we're lucky that we are in a literary ecosystem now where there are more books for black boys, more books for black girls, more books for black children, more books also that reflect, you know, I think something that didn't exist a lot, especially in like, the 90s and early aughts, was queerness in.

In black characters.

And, you know, I'm so grateful for the authors who've like, pushed our.

Provided literature for young people who ex, you know, took that reveal and.

And sit with and explore that experience again, because I.

I am just.

I.

What matters to me is that the pluralism of black life, the pluralism and diversity and heterogeneity of black identity is reveled in and is and is and.

And is dissected and is explored.

You know, they.

There are million.

You know what, there's 40 million of us in America now.

And our identities, how we navigate the world, how we move through each day are shaped by a range of different factors.

You know, whether my.

Whether your parents immigrated from another country, whether you're in South Carolina or Nevada, whether you're queer or not, whether you are, you know, speak a different language.

I mean, just like in.

In an indescribable and ineffable amount of differences that shape who we are.

And so any notion of blackness being a monolithic, homogenous thing is.

Is silly.

Certainly there are shared cultural understandings and, and collective realities that band our community together.

And that's one of, you know, the.

The violence of that history is one of the worst things.

And the culture that emerged from that history despite that violence is one of the most amazing things.

But within the shared culture, there is also so many idiosyncrasies and so many differences.

And, And I want the sort of both.

I want books that sit with the both endedness of that.

Right, that, that sit in the.

The shared set of cultural experiences, but that also don't impose a set of shared cultural experiences as being the same as Shared experiences in totality.

And yeah, and that's, again, whether that's Harlem Renaissance, whether that's the work of.

Of.

Of those folks who are writing, you know, in my adolescence, I think we are.

The writers who are writing now are building on the, the groundwork that was laid by those folks.

And there were gaps in.

As I kind of just alluded to, there were gaps and things missing in those texts that, that people are trying to write into now in the same way that I'm sure there are gaps in the ways that we are writing that, that younger generations of writers, newer generations of writers will.

Will write into, you know, and, And I think that that's part of the, the black literary tradition is that people lay groundwork, they lay foundation.

And like, we, you know, we're building these stairs and like, you sometimes you gotta go back and like, fix some stairs that, that you use because, you know, they weren't.

They weren't built in a way that is consistent with what we know about how.

How stairs should be built today, to extend the metaphor.

But, but yeah, it's.

I think all of that is really important.

Right?

That's awesome.

Awesome.

So what I want to do is I want to kind of jump forward.

So we have Walter Dean Myers, and I think if I recall properly, was.

Was a slam.

You had Jacqueline Woodson, Miracles.

Boy, Boys.

You had the Norton.

I'm trying to remember if that was a book that I had when I was taking African American lit in college.

Norton.

This is the mother of the book.

This is that book from college.

Yeah, I think mine.

Which edition is that?

Because mine was blue.

Oh, interesting.

Copyright 1997.

What edition is this it might be for?

I don't know if it's first edition.

It doesn't.

Probably not first edition, but.

Okay.

You know, shout out to.

To Skip Gates, man.

He.

He created, you know, he, he has done.

A lot of people today only know Skip for.

Yeah, the documentaries, but like the, the work that Henry Louis Gates has done to collect and anthologize and lift up black writers and black literature, I mean, is.

Is really remarkable.

It's a, it's a remarkable sort of curated curatorial work that he, that he has done.

And I think, you know, as.

And he's, you know, he's still very busy, still doing so much, but yeah, yeah, his, his early literary scholarship is, Is really valuable.

Yeah.

I think he definitely needs to be given his flowers now because he has contributed a lot.

And I, I'm.

I'm.

I am the fact that you still have Your book.

Like, my semester ended.

Like, I'm getting my money back, as much of it as I can.

I trade that sucker so fast.

Like, how much I'm getting for this book here.

I think there were just that I wanted to hold on to.

Yeah, I.

I got it.

I got it.

I got Understood.

So we don't.

I don't want to.

Because people, you know, have heard this part of your story in terms of pretty short.

You shared, you know.

Right.

How you got published.

Right.

This isn't that story.

Right.

So you write the book.

How the word is passed.

It does phenomenally.

Well.

What I'm curious about is either before that period that you.

While you're.

Right.

I guess the pandemic.

While you're writing that book, after you write the book.

Book.

Were there any books that you encountered that made you stop and take note of.

Okay, like, here are the core principles I wish to live by.

Like, as a writer, you know, and as a person.

Like, when I.

I think about paranomics.

I came on Power Nominal, I think, was recommended to me.

I was a part of the NAACP in our local area, and we had a book club.

We're talking about black business development.

And I was part of economic committee.

So they assigned us Power Nomics by Claude Anderson, Dr.

Claude Anderson.

And I had read his other books while I was in college, but I had never read that one.

And after reading it, you know, we had already launched Mahogany Books, but it gave me an enhanced view.

I helped to really kind of drill down on some core principles that we wanted Mahogany Books to exist by that became like, okay, this is it.

So I'm wondering if there was something that you read during that time or after that.

You know, what.

As you talk about, you know, how you want people to.

How you see publishing going.

Right.

The direction that you see it going, and how you want to contribute to make sure that there's the variety of identities being seen in literature.

I'm just curious if there was some books that you read that got you to that place or may not be that specific thing.

But I'm just curious what was some of the standout books that you could say was definitive in shaping you as a writer and, you know, as the husband.

Father that you are.

Yeah, I think there's a couple.

I would say, in terms of.

On the level of the line, on the sort of pure literary level, I would say Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones is a book that I think of as just like, the language is just.

It's.

It's it was.

It's so beautiful, you know, so lyrical.

It's so rich.

The, The You.

I mean, in terms of.

I use that sort of language of like the sensory experience, like the sensory experience of reading a Jesmyn Ward book is like you smell everything.

You taste everything.

You feel the way the sun moves across your face, you feel the way the wind brushes across your cheek.

You feel the way, you know, the anxiety someone carries in their body.

And obviously I resonate with that book in part because it's, you know, one of the conceits is that is.

Is about Katrina, which impacted my life and, and you know, I've since gotten to know Jasmine and she's, you know, a remarkable, brilliant, wonderful person.

But that book, I think that book, when I think about how the word is passed, I was like, okay, I want my book to ex.

To have the same sort of cinematic sensory landscape that this book has.

And then I would say Isabel Wilkerson's the Warmth of Other Suns is one that demonstrated for me the possibilities of.

Of narrative non fiction.

It took a history that had been a sort of abstraction to me in some ways like I'm.

Or.

Or a sort of existed in.

In the realm of a historical phenomenon that I knew about in the.

In the sense of the Great Migration, but.

But it, it made it so real, it made it so human, it made it so.

So rich and textured, you know, and she tells the stories of these three different folks and, and does it with such detail and does it with such precision and does it with such three dimensionality.

You know, these aren't caricatures.

She's not talking only about how bad they were, only about how good they were, is that they were people.

And she depicted them as people who were experiencing this moment in history that.

That again, I think exists as a sort of historical abstraction to many folks, but.

But made it so.

So dynamic and so real and gave us a sense of the psychological and emotional stakes of like, what it meant to be.

To live in a.

In.

In places where terror of black life was ubiquitous and, and went unpunished and to.

To seek to.

And the.

The difficulty of wanting to be safe but not wanting to leave home, but wanting to get.

Get a better life, but not wanting to go to a place where you don't know, have the community and the history and the intergenerational lineage that you do in this place.

And so again, it's this sort of tension of like being forced to leave home against your will, but to protect your family and yourself, but to, and then to go and try to create and forge new possibilities and these new places.

It's, it's an incredible book.

I don't reread a lot of books just because so many books to read but, but that's one that I try to sort of do a regular rereading of and I'm due for one now because it's so, so great.

And then I would also say Annette Gordon reads the Hemings is a Monticello of yeah, Neckwood Reed.

She's a law professor at an historian at Harvard.

And she's kind of the, the scholar like theme, the number one scholar on Jefferson and slavery and specifically Jefferson and his relationship to the Hemings's family and the enslaved property who you know, he owned over 600 enslaved people over the course of his lifetime.

And Annette Gordon Reeves scholarship has done more to illuminate that facet of Jefferson's legacy than perhaps any anybody else.

And I remember reading the Hemings is Monticello and, and being so blown away both by the sort of revelations of, of Jefferson having been the father of several of Sally Hemings's children and the insidious context in which that happened.

You know, he being a man in his 40s, she being a teenager, she is the half sister of his wife because his father in law had children with his enslaved property, a woman who was enslaved by him.

And so, you know, it's this woman who's.

There's this sort of the, the intergenerational insidiousness of it revealed but also just like to, to make the people, the enslaved people at Monticello, they just became real.

You know, again, it, like when we think about Jefferson, even if you're aware of Jefferson as a slave owner, the enslaved people who were his property are.

Remain a sort of abstraction.

You know, they're there to kind of, they're.

They're the clouds in the sky, but you don't necessarily see them with any level of detail, any level of humanity.

And, and the way that she uses that book to talk about like who these people were and what they loved and what they feared and what they, who they were over the course of their lives, I felt so beautifully done and it inspired me to go to Monticello, which I had never done.

And it was the Monticello was the first chapter of how the Word is Passed.

And so I, you know, I don't know that how the Word is Passed exists in the way that it does without me having read Annette's book.

And, and I think you Know, part of what it also did was demonstrate for me that there was, you know, scholars like Annette and.

And so many others have done just incredible work exploring the archive of enslavement and reading those books by, you know, an Ed Gordon Reed, Leslie Harris and Dinah Raymond Berry and Vincent Brown and Walter Johnson, Ira Berlin.

I mean, the list goes on and on and on, was so transformative for me.

And I thought that there.

That I might be able to build on their scholarship in a way that could tell us something about how we remember that these pieces of history.

And so, you know, Annette's book was the first book like that.

That gave me a sense of how I might be able to take a book that is about Monticello and the people who inhabited it and go there now to explore how the story of these places is told today.

And so what does it mean to bring the sort of literary sensibilities to aspire toward the literary sensibilities of like a Jesmyn Ward and to bring that to the history excavated by somebody like Annette Gordon Reed in the context of a larger nonfiction narrative like Isabel Wilkerson.

So I think those three books are among.

Among those that.

That really helped make the project possible.

This is.

I mean, I'm just.

I.

So I think forever now when I read your work, I'm going to see it through an entirely different lens.

And I really do appreciate this conversation because understanding the importance of the bringing things to life, right, like using words to really give people and sensations like this.

Lord have mercy, my blur is coming out.

So all I'm thinking about, the living force is the word that goes to my mind.

I don't know if anyone gets that out there, but there's this part of Star wars lore where, God, I can't believe I'm even going into this right now, where basically the idea of the living force, that everything exists in the presence right now.

And take your time to understand what the now is saying to you.

And what I love about everything that you've relayed to me so far is from the early times of you writing your poetry about the color gray and how, you know, your toddler brother was annoying you.

It felt like everything was building on acknowledging the feeling of this moment.

Like, no matter what it is, even this color gray that no one would think of as a vibrant, like, meaningful color.

People red and blue and sky blue.

But you're finding emotion and feeling right in all of it.

And here how you talk about, you know, Walter D.

Myers and Jacqueline Ward.

Jazz.

I'm sorry, Jacqueline Woodson, then Jasmine Ward, Board.

Right.

And I have not read Annette Gordon Reed.

I know we sell a lot of her books.

I see her on our shelves a lot.

It really makes me think about, like, taking a step back when I read you now is.

What else is he conveying in this moment?

Right.

How is he bringing life to these individuals, these moments that I should consider more in depth versus, you know, versus just kind of getting through the chapter and taking what I think is the.

The big point and maybe taking it slower to read, to maybe really kind of feel what's happening in a moment.

So that's me.

That's just, you know me.

I could be way off, but that's not.

I appreciate that.

It's.

There's this.

There's this quote by this writer, Alfred Lord Tennyson, sort of old British writer, who, in his poem Ulysses has a line where he says, I am a part of all that I have met.

And I love that line because I think it's so.

It's so simple, but it so beautifully distills the way that I think.

The way I think of what it means to be human and which is to say that we are the manifestation of all the people we've ever met, all the conversations we've ever had, all of the art we've ever consumed, all of the books we've ever read, all the different facets of our identity and how those shape us, and this confluence of all those things come together to shape our sensibilities.

And my book, you know, how the word is passed is.

Is a sort of physical and literary manifestation of that idea.

Like that.

That book carries everything of me that came before.

You know, that came before is nobody else could have written that book in the same way that I could have written.

Couldn't have written a Jesmyn Moore book or a Jackie Woodson book or Walter D.

Myers book.

Because for any of us, what we create is the.

Not the culmination, but again, the sort of manifestation of all the books we read, that we put into that book, all the music we've listened to, that we put into, all the children we've raised and the people who raise dust and the.

The communities were a part of all those things.

All, you know, whether in conscious or unconscious ways, with big or small shape, how we move through the world and how we create what we do.

And.

And I think that that is, you know, what.

What makes great art.

What it is, is that it is only.

Any.

Any piece of art that is created is only possible because of everything that has gone into the person who becomes the vessel of.

Of said art.

Right.

Awesome.

Fantastic.

So what's interesting is that it.

You.

In terms of how we break down.

I break down a show and the segments, right.

You know, go through the origin story, we go through, you know, you're becoming.

And then I love to kind of wrap things up with like, leaving a legacy.

And it feels like you just.

When you answered that question right there.

Right.

And that's.

That's, I think, fitting for us to begin to wrap up, because I think that does definitely speak to the community aspect of what one we hope to accomplish through our work.

Work as a book, as booksellers.

Right.

Bringing people together.

But when you get down to the individual, to the specific words and the works that are on a show, specifically yours, how we hope they impact the people in the community.

And what's interesting is that actually our tagline, we don't really promote it, but we don't push it like that.

But our tagline is books, community, words and you.

And the idea behind that was for the collective words that makes up a book.

There are collective people that make up a community, and within those books, there are specific words that will impact individual people that enhance our broader community.

Right.

And so I was trying to figure out a way it's to tie what you just said, the.

The whole to the individual and the individual to the whole.

And we.

We can't accomplish anything if the two aren't connected and working and synchronic.

And I must mess this word up.

Synchronicity.

I think that's the word I'm trying to say.

So, yeah, so I.

I really love that part of.

In terms of leaving the legacy, what it is that you're accomplishing.

I know you're working on some work, you've been traveling.

Do you want to share some?

You want to keep it under wraps?

Yeah, No, I mean, it's.

I.

I'm writing this book about.

So the conceit of how the word is passed is it's about historical sites around the country that have a relationship to the history of slavery.

And so I, you know, I go to all these different cities, sites, memorials, monuments, museums, to explore how different places remember or misremember slavery.

And one of the place I, after the book was published, I was on tour, and one of the things that kept coming up was sort of international comparisons and specifically Germany.

And so people would always say, you know, Germany does this and Germany does that, and this is how Germany memorialized is the Holocaust.

And this is how we should be more like Germany.

We should be.

And.

And I began to invoke Germany myself.

And then I had a moment where, like, you know, after a couple months, I was like, I keep talking about Germany and what they're doing with monuments, but I've never.

I've never been to Germany.

And so I, you know, for me, it felt incumbent upon me as a, you know, as a writer, scholar, thinker, journalist, like to go over there to try to see for myself, like, what Germany was doing and how it was telling the story.

And so I went there in 2022 to.

To get a sense of how Germany was telling the story of World War II, specifically what the landscape of memory looked like in Germany around the Holocaust.

And that ended up being a story for the Atlantic in the.

I think that came out in 2022, and that served as a catalyst for me to develop this sort of larger interest in World War II memorialization.

And so I got really interested after my time in Germany, you know, visiting Dachau concentration camp, visiting the memorial to the murder Jews of Europe, visiting the train tracks from which Jewish people were sent to their death.

I got really interested in going to other places around the world that tell the story of World War II, because I realized that the story I got about World War II growing up was sort of disproportionately shaped by.

Shaped by, like, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood movies and, you know, a lot, and I like a lot of those movies, but they.

The story of World War II was bigger than Normandy and D Day and.

And existed beyond the sort of American centric context that I had learned about it, and specifically the white American centric context.

And so I started writing this book, currently titled Just Beneath the Soil, that is exploring how World War II was remembered in different international contexts across the world.

Japan, South Korea, Germany, some other places and.

But also within the country.

What stories?

How is the story of Japanese internment told?

How is the story of the Navajo code talkers told?

How's the story of the soldiers from.

From the south, black soldiers from Mississippi specifically told?

And so that's.

That's the project I've been working on.

I just got back from Japan about 72 hours ago, so I feel my body's confused and all my circadian rhythms are thrown off.

But it was such an incredible trip.

You know, I spent.

I spent a week, several days in Nagasaki, Japan, and I just learned so much.

And that's.

That's what I like about all these projects is just first and foremost, for me, they're an opportunity to learn, and I get to be in conversation with survivors and teach myself about this history in ways that I.

I probably otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to.

So it's.

It's really generative and.

And intellectually fulfilling, and so aiming for 2026 as a publication, but, you know, I schedule my travel around my kids soccer games and gymnastics classes.

So, you know, we're trying to make it happen.

Okay, well, we're going to get.

We're gonna get one of these Smiths to the.

To the MLS or on the world.

On the World cup stage.

We're gonna figure this out.

We go.

I don't know about all that.

We'll see.

Okay, well, before we wrap up, I'd love to ask of our guests, why do black books matter to you?

You know, as much as our world is changing, as much as technology is changing, as much as, you know, we live in a moment in which there's never been more to do than there is now, like, you've never had more options for stimulation, entertainment, distraction than you have in 2024, more than ever in human history.

And books are a very old form of technology.

But I think they are still so important and still play such a pivotal role.

Obviously, you know, I'm biased.

I'm a.

I'm a writer.

But.

But I think even beyond that, like, I think they have.

So there's something unique about what you can say in a book and the way you can say it, the way that you can share that information, pass that information on, the way it serves as a.

A contained space through which to ask questions, engage in meditations, reflections, explorations that.

That can't be.

That are very unique to what is done, you know, via audio or visual or other.

Other contexts.

And so in the context of black.

I think books matter and will continue to matter for as long as humans are around.

And I think black books specifically are important because they are an archive of, as we've been talking about in this whole conversation, the plurality of the black experience.

And that plurality existed during inflamement, that plurality existed during segregation.

That plurality existed in the early 20th century.

That plurality exists now.

And what you want are books that reflect the dynamism of black life, that.

That takes seriously the history of violence and oppression that black people have experienced, that illuminate it, that make it clear for readers, and also that you have books that make clear that black life is not singularly defined by that violence, by that trauma.

And.

And you have to have work that is doing both of those things and everything in between.

And so I'm, I'm grateful for all the, all the writers who write across that spectrum because it's, it's all important, it's all essential and, and it'll, it gives us.

Books, I think can be both.

They can be either a mirror or window, right?

A sort of mirror in which you.

You look out of.

You look into the mirror and you see something that you might not about in.

You see something in that book about yourself that you might not necessarily have had the language for, but, but in which you deeply resonate with.

It could be a window in which it gives you a set of.

It provides you with information about a set of experiences that are very different than your own that allow you to see with a new level of insight and maybe empathy to again to like to, to a group of people or a set of experiences that are so different from yours.

And sometimes maybe at their best, books can be both a mirror and a window.

Almost like a window in which you can see your reflection that both lets you see a different set of experiences, but maybe in that other set of experiences you see something about yourself that there is universality in the granular.

So, so yeah, and that, that is as, as resonant and, and tied to the specific experience of, of black literature as much as anything.

Fantastic.

Well that's, you know, can't end any better than that.

I want to say first of all, first and foremost to you, thank you for pushing through, for taking the time to speak with me.

Understand you travels tired.

Hey, I really, really appreciate it.

This was awesome.

Again, this is everything that I was hoping for more and again, like I said, I've really learned a lot and I think I really appreciate your work even more having had this conversation with you to understand like just the humanity that you.

That you're bringing to.

To what you write.

So.

Hey guys, that's our show today.

We want to thank the.

Our special guest, New York Times best selling author award winning poet Clint Smith for joining us today on the Reader of Black Genius podcast.

Remember, please check the show notes for a full list of the books discussed here today.

And of course if you are interested in picking up one or more of these titles, we encourage you to visit our show sponsor, mahoganybooks.com the premier destination for new classic and best selling black books.

Our show would not be possible without the hard work of Shed Life Productions.

Lastly, the Reader of Black Genius podcast is a member of the Mahogany Books Podcast Network.

Check them out for other great shows like ours focused on books written for by or by people of the African Diaspora.

Please like review and share wherever you get your podcast and peace.

We appreciate you guys and remember, black folks matter.

Thanks.