#1 New York Times best-selling author Clint Smith to discuss slavery across America

The International African American Museum will sponsor a virtual Fireside Chat event with author Clint Smith in honor of International Museum Day on May 18, 2022. Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, will share stories from his book and experiences traveling internationally.

Smith’s most recent book earned the number one spot on the New York Times Best Seller List, as well as the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. The International African American Museum will talk with Smith about his experience traveling to various historic sites and monuments — all of which are reckoning with their history of slavery. With Dr. Bernard Powers, founding director of the College of Charleston’s Center for the Study of Slavery as moderator, and Bishop Dr. Claude R. Alexander, Jr., a globally renowned activist and senior pastor of The Park Church as co-panelist, the Fireside Chat with Smith will explore why it is so important to honor and tell the untold, under-told, and hidden stories of our country’s past.

The virtual chat will kick off a series of summer events hosted by the museum, as it prepares for opening in late 2022 / early 2023. The Fireside Chat will be offered to the public in a Zoom online seminar format, starting at 6:30 p.m. ET, with preregistration required.

For more information or to register for the event, visit https://iaamuseum.org/events/.

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times Bestseller and a 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner for Nonfiction. His poetry collection, Counting Descent, won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art for Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His 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.

The International African American Museum (IAAM) explores cultures and knowledge systems retained and adapted by Africans in the Americas and the diverse journeys and achievements of these individuals and their descendants in South Carolina, the United States, and throughout the African Diaspora. IAAM is a champion of authentic, empathetic storytelling of American history and is thus one of the nation’s newest platforms for the disruption of institutionalized racism as it evolves today. Set to open in late 2022, IAAM is positioned to honor the untold stories of the African American journey from Charleston, S.C., at the historically sacred site of Gadsden’s Wharf and beyond. For more information, please visit iaamuseum.org or call 843-872-5352.