3 Quotes & Sayings By Neilson Voyne Smith

Born: April 19th, 1971, in New York City. Neilson Voyne Smith is a poet and investigative journalist. He is the son of former NBC News anchor Brian Barger and has two brothers, Aaron and Daniel. Smith was raised in New York City and attended private schools. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 with a double bachelor's degree in English and African American studies. In 1995 he became a founding member of the black cultural organization Kwanzaa Nation, where he served as its executive director until 2003. On February 25th, 2003, Smith was arrested along with his brother Aaron for entering the Senate office building without authorization to film testimony of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and other members of the Bush administration on television and tape record it Read more

The brothers were sentenced to three months in prison after pleading guilty to felony charges of trespassing and third-degree burglary. Mr. Smith is a regular contributor to BlackCommentator.com, where he writes about news and politics, as well as poetry and music reviews. He is also a contributing writer for TheRootDC.com.

His poem "The History" appeared in the anthologies "The Spirit of '67" (University Press of Mississippi) and "Black Men Speak" (Haymarket Books). He has written for The New York Times Magazine, Ebony Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Chicago Tribune Magazine, The Nation Magazine, Black Enterprise Magazine, Jet Magazine Online, Amsterdam News Online, The Guardian Weekly Online , Uptown Magazine Online , Sputnik News Online , PublicEyeNewsOnline , BKLYNdigestOnline , Somedia Online , Prodigy Online , Essence Magazine Online , Neshoba Democrat-Herald online , Huffington Post online , Mondo Bizarro online . He has served as an adjunct faculty member at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn since 2008. Mr. Smith makes regular appearances on television news outlets including MSNBC's "The Ed Show", HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher", Al Jazeera America's "America Tonight", Fox News' "Hannity", CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360°", CNN's Anderson Cooper 360° Special Reports for Black History Month 2012, CNN's Special Report into the Trayvon Martin tragedy in 2012."Anderson Cooper 360°" aired an interview with Neilson Voyne Smith on February 28th 2013.

On November 22nd 2014 Mr Smith appeared on "Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld" on

1
The linguistic system represented in the mind-brain gives some account of everything submitted to it: good sentences, bad sentences, sentences in other languages, ums and ahs, coughs; perhaps -Chomsky suggests- even to non-linguistic events like a squeaking door. Neilson Voyne Smith
2
How is it that you can read this book? An obvious answer is because you know English. An equally obvious answer is because the light is on. These two explanations for an apparently trivial ability can illuminate a fundamental dichotomy: the difference between our knowledge of language and our use of that knowledge; between our competence and our performance. Your knowledge of grammar and vocabulary of English, your competence as a speaker of English, is prerequisite to your understanding this sentence; the exercise of this competence is made possible by the fact, among many others, that the light is on. . Neilson Voyne Smith