Mychal Denzel Smith

Mychal Denzel Smith is the author of the New York Times bestseller Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching (2016). He is featured in and was a consulting producer for “Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story,” the Paramount Network docu-series executive produced by Jay-Z. In 2014 and 2016, TheRoot.com named him one of the 100 Most Influential African Americans.Stakes Is High, winner of the 2020 Nonfiction Kirkus Prize, is the book we need to guide us past crisis mode and through an uncertain future. The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. Smith exposes the stark contradictions at the heart of American life and helps envision a future that is not as grim as our past.
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The weather is getting cooler, so I’m in the mood for hearty, warm, rustic kinds of meals. I had a craving for chili and went searching for recipes to try and found what I think is my new favorite over at Food & Wine. It’s a chicken-beer-hominy chili and it’s soooo good, especially if you like chipotle. I’d never had hominy before but now I’m going to put it in everything.








Brave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is the book we need to guide us past crisis mode and through an uncertain future.
The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our path, the promise that hard work and determination will carry us to freedom. But in Stakes Is High, Mychal Denzel Smith confronts the shortcomings of these stories -- and with the American Dream itself -- and calls on us to live up to the principles we profess but fail to realize.
The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our path, the promise that hard work and determination will carry us to freedom. But in Stakes Is High, Mychal Denzel Smith confronts the shortcomings of these stories -- and with the American Dream itself -- and calls on us to live up to the principles we profess but fail to realize.
In a series of incisive essays, Smith exposes the stark contradictions at the heart of American life, holding all of us, individually and as a nation, to account. We've gotten used to looking away, but the fissures and casual violence of institutional oppression are ever-present.
There is a future that is not as grim as our past. In this profound work, Smith helps us envision it with care, honesty, and imagination.