How the Word Is Passed
Published in 2021, How the Word Is Passed is Clint Smith's tour of places in the United States and one in Senegal that carry the legacy of American slavery. Smith, a poet and Atlantic staff writer, visits Monticello, the Whitney Plantation, Angola Prison, a Confederate cemetery, Galveston on Juneteenth, New York City, and Goree Island. At each stop he listens carefully to tour guides, descendants, and other visitors, then situates what he hears within the documented history of slavery and its long aftermath. The book is a study in how Americans tell, mistell, and refuse to tell this past, and how those choices shape public memory. Smith writes with the eye of a poet and the patience of a reporter, asking how the country might begin to face its own history more honestly. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.
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What you might want to know about How the Word Is Passed
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A poet and reporter visits sites across America that shaped, and still shape, the story of slavery.
Both; Smith uses present day visits as the frame for reported history at each location.
Yes, mature high school students can read it, and many schools have used it for classroom discussion.
How the Word Is Passed was written by Clint Smith, published in 2021 by Hachette Book Group.
How the Word Is Passed is 344 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, How the Word Is Passed takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
How the Word Is Passed is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.