Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named one of the New York Times10 Best Books of 202. How the Word is Passed: is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers
