Award-winning author Clint Smith is writing a book about World War II sites, Random House announced in a news release.
There is no release date yet for Smith’s Just Beneath the Soil, which the publisher says “will largely focus on the experiences of groups of people whose stories often sit at the peripheries of the conflict’s dominant narrative, giving an intimate account of their lived experience during the war.” The book is part of a three-book deal with the author.
Smith, a staff writer at the Atlantic, is the author of two poetry collections, Counting Descent and Above Ground. His debut nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, was published in 2021 by Little, Brown; the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
In Just Beneath the Soil, Random House says, Smith “will visit World War II sites around the world alongside survivors, descendants, and residents who have a particular relationship to each place.”
“Smith has chosen several subjects around the world to tell the stories that have, until now, fallen outside that war's central mythology,” the publisher says, “including a Japanese-American woman born in a Japanese Internment camp, the oldest living Navajo code talker, a Korean woman who was forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, a Jewish activist in Germany, and his great uncle who fought for the US but returned to face Jim Crow.”
Smith announced news of the book on Instagram, writing, “I’ve already learned so much since I started working on this, can’t wait to keep learning more.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
