Decriminalizing Race & Poverty: Clint Smith In Conversation with James Woodall

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 the poetry collection Counting Descent, which 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.

Clint 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. He is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and a 2017 recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review.

James Woodall currently serves as Public Policy Associate of the Southern Center for Human Rights, Founder/CEO of The Major Wish Group LLC, and former State President of Georgia NAACP. James is also an Associate Minister at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church in Marietta, Georgia. James also served as an Intelligence Analyst in the U.S. Army for 8 years. He ran for State Representative in 2016 and served on the State Committee of the Democratic Party of Georgia. He previously served as the deputy campaign manager for Francys Johnson’s (D) 2018 bid for Congress and as the legislative aide to State Representative Miriam Paris (D) for three years in the Georgia General Assembly.

He has been named to Georgia Southern’s “40 under 40,” and “Alumnus of the Year” in 2020 and was named a 2021 #Atlanta500 Leader by Atlanta Magazine.  James is a Fellow of the second class of the Civil Society Fellowship, a Partnership of ADL and The Aspen Institute, and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.