Watkins, D.

D. Watkins is the New York Times bestselling author of The Beast Side, The Cook Up, Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised, and We Speak for Ourselves. He is editor at large for Salon and his work has been published in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and other publications. At 9 years old, Watkins had three concerns in life: picking his dad’s Lotto numbers, keeping his Nikes free of creases, and being a man. At the time, his home of East Baltimore was a poverty-stricken city battling the height of the crack epidemic. Like many boys around him, Watkins was thrust out of childhood and into a world where manhood meant surviving by slinging crack and finding oneself on the right side of a pistol. For 30 years, Watkins was forced to safeguard every moment of joy he experienced or risk losing himself entirely. In Black Boy Smile: A Memoir in Moments (Legacy Lit), he harnesses these experiences to tell the story of how he matured into the man he is today – beloved author, college professor, editor, and devoted husband and father. Black Boy Smile is the story of a Black boy who healed.