Thanks in part to his popular TED talks and a high Twitter profile, Clint Smith was already well known as a poet and thinker even before he began work on a doctorate at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.
But Smith, a New Orleans native, doesn't see his new role as a graduate student as a change in direction. "I kind of follow in the tradition of some folks — some thinkers and scholars I really look up — who reject the idea of intellectual compartmentalization," Smith said, citing W.E.B. Du Bois as a model in rejecting "this notion that your intellectual project could only manifest itself in one particular way."
For Smith, a National Poetry Slam champion who began writing verse while teaching high school English, all of his work — whether as an educator, a social scientist, or a poet — aims to address the same set of questions. Chief among them is the big one: "Why does the world look the way that it does today?" It's a question Smith looks at through the lens of racial inequality in everything from education to incarceration to images in popular culture.
"Counting Descent" is Smith's first volume of poetry; much of it focuses on his childhood. A major theme of the book, he added, "is what I call the marathon of cognitive dissonance" of growing up black in America. "What does it mean to grow up in a home in which you feel loved, affirmed, and celebrated, and then go out to a broader world in which you are constantly rendered a caricature of fear, in which you are stopped and frisked?"
Whether mining his own life stories or "sitting with these ideas and these texts, the history I read, the sociology I read," Smith added, "it comes out in the form of art."
Smith will read 7 p.m. Friday at Harvard Book Store, and 7 p.m. Nov. 16 at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.
Kate Tuttle, a writer and editor, can be reached at kate.tuttle@gmail.com.