Clint Smith, Ph.D.
Staff writer at The Atlantic and New York Times bestselling author
Marcus Campbell, Ed.D.
Superintendent, Evanston Township High School D202, Evanston, IL
Above Ground: A Conversation with Clint Smith
BONUS BOOK GIVEAWAY! FAN is giving away copies of Above Ground to guests randomly selected from the Zoom attendance report. All details on the webinar registration page.
Clint Smith, Ph.D.’s vibrant and compelling new poetry collection, the New York Times bestseller Above Ground, traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body.
Smith is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, 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 a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Smith’s essays, poems, and scholarly writing have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry 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 where he was named the Christine D. Sarbanes Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Humanities Council. He is the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History. He received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.
Smith will be in conversation with Marcus Campbell, Ed.D., Superintendent of Evanston Township High school D202. Dr. Campbell has 22 years of experience at ETHS, starting as an English teacher, and has played a central role in the district’s equity transformation programs and initiatives.
This event suitable for youth 12+. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.
Event Sponsors
- Baker Demonstration School
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- Catherine Cook School
- Chiaravalle Montessori School
- Chicago Jewish Day School
- Compass Health Center
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- Evanston Township High School D202
- Family Service Center
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- Gorton Center
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- Hyde Park Day School
- Illinois Student Assistance Commission
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- Lake Bluff D65
- Lake Forest Academy
- Lake Forest Country Day School
- Lake Michigan Association of Independent Schools
- Leo Catholic High School
- Magnetar Capital
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- North Shore Country Day
- Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy
- Rebel Human
- Regina Dominican College Preparatory High School
- Resurrection College Prep High School
- Roycemore School
- Sacred Heart Schools
- Science & Arts Academy
- Stevenson High School D125
- The Alliance for Early Childhood
- The Cove School
- The Family Institute at Northwestern University
- The Frances Xavier Warde School
- University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
- University of Chicago Laboratory Schools Parents’ Association
- Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District
- Wolcott College Prep
- Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart
- Youth & Opportunity United (Y.O.U.)
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