Inprint Clint Smith & Patricia Smith Reading

2023/2024 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series 

 Clint Smith and Patricia Smith will read from their recent poetry collections Above Ground and Unshuttered, followed by an on-stage conversation with Houston Poet Laureate Aris Kian. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. 

CLINT SMITH’s 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award winning How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America – “merging memoir, travelogue, and history” (The New York Review of Books) – was a #1 New York Times bestseller and received the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism. His debut poetry collection Counting Descent was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. Of his latest collection Above Ground, named a “Most Anticipated Book of 2023” by Time, The Millions, and Elle, and a “Best Poetry Book of 2023” by Book Riot, Monica Youn says his poems “make palpable… the contingent boundaries of love and loss, past and present, sanctuary and violence, ‘us’ and ‘them.’” A staff writer at The Atlantic, Clint Smith’s writing has also been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.

PATRICIA SMITH – poet, teacher, and performance artist – is, according to Terrance Hayes, “a storm of beautiful, frightening talent.” Her eight poetry collections include Incendiary Art, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. She joins us to read from and talk about her new collection Unshuttered, which reanimates a collection of 19^th century photographs of Black men, women, and children. As Gregory Orr writes, “Her poems … zip along the textured surface of these worlds and plunge to the soul-depths of the people who inhabit them.”

ARIS KIAN ranks #2 in the 2023 Womxn of the World Poetry Slam and is the 2023-2025 Houston Poet Laureate. She received her MFA from the University of Houston as an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow where she also was awarded the 2022 Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing. Her poems are published with Button Poetry, West Branch, Obsidian Lit, The West Review and elsewhere.

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