Clint Smith's work blends art and activism.

Why you should listen

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the award for best poetry collection from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, as well as the forthcoming narrative nonfiction book How the Word Is Passed. Smith has received fellowships from New America, 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. He received his BA in English from Davidson College and a PhD in education from Harvard University.

Clint Smith’s TED talks

More news and ideas from Clint Smith

Live from TED2018

Short talks, big energy: Notes from TED Unplugged at TED2018

April 11, 2018

“This is a little different than the mainstage at TED, in a sense that this is a little more relaxed,” says our host, the poet and TED speaker Clint Smith. “These are speakers who have not been selected specifically for the mainstage, but they’re just as talented, just as brilliant, and just as important.” A […]

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In Brief

A “living fossil” spotted in the South Pacific, a machine that vomits + poetry that rethinks assumptions about inmates

September 3, 2015

The TED community has news to share. Read on for highlights. The rarest animal on Earth, spotted once again. Peter Ward hadn’t seen his “old friend,” the Allonautilus scrobiculatus, since 1984. But he recognized its hairy, slimy, golden shell instantly. Ward wrote about his rediscovery of this creature — alongside its more-common relative, the nautilus, […]

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