Events › Voices for Justice Juneteenth Celebration: Clint Smith

Chicago Public Library is pleased to welcome Clint Smith as part of our Voices for Justice speaker series, and in celebration of Juneteenth, to discuss his book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. He will be in conversation with Candace Moore, City of Chicago Chief Equity Officer and Dr. Obari Cartman, President of the Chicago Association of Black Psychologists. The conversation will be moderated by WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore. 

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, 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. 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.

Natalie Moore covers segregation and inequality for WBEZ. Her enterprise reporting has tackled race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. Natalie’s work has been broadcast on the BBC, Marketplace and NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. Natalie is the author of The South Side, winner of the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and a Buzzfeed best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation and Deconstructing Tyrone. Natalie is the author of The Billboard, a play about abortion. 

Candace Moore is the City of Chicago's first Chief Equity Officer, where she leads the Office of Equity and Racial Justice. OERJ seeks to advance institutional change that results in an equitable transformation of how we do business across the City of Chicago, including service delivery, resource distribution, policy creation and decision-making. OERJ will do this by supporting City departments in normalizing concepts of racial equity, organizing staff to work together for transformational change, and operationalizing new practices, policies and procedures that result in more fair and just outcomes.​

Dr. Obari Cartman is a grassroots mental health advocate whose recent work includes being a trauma focused clinician, restorative justice coach and program evaluator with Healing Empowering and Learning Professions, and he recently created a male rites of passage curriculum called MANifest. Dr. Cartman is the current President of the Chicago Association of Black Psychologists and curator of a directory of Black mental health providers. 

This program is made possible thanks to generous support from the Chicago Public Library Foundation. For more information on the Foundation, visit cplfoundation.org.

How to Attend

This event will take place live on CPL's YouTube channel and CPL's Facebook page. You'll be able to ask questions during the event as well! Can't make it to the live stream? We'll archive the video on YouTube to watch later.

Accessibility

Automatic captioning is available via Facebook and YouTube's closed captioning setting. Need ASL interpretation or other accommodations for this event? Please call (312) 747-4015. Requests must be made at least 14 business days before the event.