Clint Smith Clint Smith is a teacher, writer, and doctoral candidate at Harvard University. He is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and was named the 2013 Christine D. Sarbanes Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Humanities Council. As a poet and essayist, he is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion, an Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The American Literary Review. His two TED Talks, The Danger of Silence and How to Raise a Black Son in America, collectively have been viewed more than 4 million times. His first full-length collection of poems, Counting Descent, is forthcoming from Write Bloody in fall of 2016.