Words and art will converge at The Jung Center’s annual fundraising dinner on Tuesday at the River Oaks Country Club. The evening will culminate with a speech by Clint Smith, who was raised in New Orleans and fled to Houston due to Hurricane Katrina.
Smith called Houston home for his senior year of high school, graduating from the Awty International School. He went on to earn a doctorate from an Ivy League university and is the bestselling author of three books, including “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.”
As Houstonians are well aware, Hurrricane Katrina became a galvanizing point in life as the city welcomed with open arms the New Orleans residents whose city was decimated by Mother Nature’s fickle finger of fate.
“I’m 36 years old now,” he said. “Katrina happened when I was 18, and so my life is very much bifurcated by the experience of Katrina. I think I’ve spent the second half of my life, in many ways, trying to make sense of that, how that experience shaped my life.”
He found that writing was cathartic as well as a way to process the trauma he had experienced.
“Poetry is how I pay attention to a moment, a feeling, a period of time, an idea…and it allows me to sit with that idea or that moment or that observation and to engage with it and meditate on it, whether it’s something happening externally in the world or something happening internally,” he said. “I have multiple poems about Katrina that speak to the experience. I’ve written dozens of poems over the years that are attempting to think through how that experience shaped me and how my years spent in Houston shaped me.”
Shape him, Katrina did. Smith describes his time in Houston as an incredibly formative year in his life.
“It was kind of like studying abroad for a year, but in Houston, and what I learned is that Awty was a microcosm of the diversity…the international and cosmopolitan nature of the city,” he said. “Houston’s diversity has a particularly international feel. What I remember most of my time there and look back most fondly on is all the different people who I met and spent time with. I met so many different types of people and ate so many different types of food and learned so much about different cultures in a way that I’m appreciative of. It was a hard time, but it was also a time that that gave me a lot of fond memories.”
He carried those memories with him into adulthood.
Growing up a soccer player, he was scouted by college recruiters, and Hurricane Katrina uprooted him from the normal high school-to-college pipeline.
Nonetheless, he visited Davidson College and made a commitment to attend before graduating high school. It turned out to be a decision that would inform his future, both on the field and in everyday life.
“One of the things about Davidson that I I’m so grateful for is that as even if you play Division One sports, they really encourage you to figure out who you are off the field and what you care about and what is meaningful to you,” Smith said. “While I was at Davidson playing soccer, I also wrote for the school newspaper. I also was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. I also worked for Big Brothers, Big Sisters of America. I also did voter registration drives. I started a poetry club at the college. I got the opportunity to study abroad in Senegal and lived in West Africa for several months, and the accumulation of those experiences allowed me to become a well-rounded person and allowed me to tap into my curiosities…allowed me to try new things that I almost certainly would not have been able to do had I gone somewhere else.”
Those experiences translated into his adult career, which has been a testament of overcoming adversity and excelling despite the hardships he encountered in his youth.
He earned a doctorate degree in education from Harvard University. 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 and the Harvard Educational Review, to name a few. He is a former National Poetry Slam champion and a recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review. Currently, he is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author.
Smith’s narrative fits directly in line with the mission of The Jung Center. Since 2019, The Jung Center’s reach has nearly tripled, helping Houstonians and people as far away as Haiti heal in order to be better parents, partners, workers and community leaders. The Jung Center’s Spring Benefit funds classes and exhibits that touch more than 30,000 people a year, providing mental health support through community education.
These classes are purposely held outside of a clinic, which is especially important in Harris County, given its federal designation as an area lacking enough mental health providers. True to Carl Jung’s understanding that creativity is necessary for personal growth and development regardless of age, The Jung Center offers art programs for all ages and exhibits art by gifted professional and amateur artists alike. The Jung Center’s building was originally a gallery and is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
The award banquet will also honor artist Mathieu Jn Baptiste, who is receiving the Carolyn Grant Fay Humanitarian Award, making him the first artist to be honored with the award named after the Center’s founder.
Born in Haiti, Jn Baptiste is a Houston-based painter, muralist and metal sculptor whose works have been seen all over the world, including three times at The Jung Center, and whose credo is that art should “teach, heal, and inspire.”
To speak at The Jung Center’s hallmark event is to join a list of Who’s Who of the creative and intellectual elite. Past speakers at The Jung Center’s annual benefit events include author Brené Brown, psychologist Esther Perel, filmmaker Judd Apatow, designer Isaac Mizrahi and author Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent 30 years on Alabama’s Death Row for a crime he did not commit.
The Jung Center will host ‘An Evening with Clint Smith’ with a reception at 6:30 p.m. and dinner at 7:30 p.m. March 18 at River Oaks Country Club, 1600 River Oaks. For information, call 713-524-8253 or visit JungHouston.org. Virtual Tickets are $150–$300; In-Person tickets are $250–$5,000.
