Kevin Young

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(Courtesy of Kevin Young)

Kevin Young is the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker and the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, newly named a National Historic Landmark. He is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, most recently Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017) and Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), both of which were longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011), winner of an American Book Award; and Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008). His collection Jelly Roll: a blues (Knopf, 2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Young’s previous nonfiction book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012) won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award; it was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He is the editor of eight other collections, most recently The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 (BOA Editions, 2012) and The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012). Named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.