Kevin Young

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Kevin
Young
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  • Nonfiction
  • Poetry
Kevin Young

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Kevin Young is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and is widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation. Young is also poetry editor at The New Yorker.

Also an editor, essayist, and curator, Young's ten books of poetry include: Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014); Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011), winner of an American Book Award; Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008); For the Confederate Dead (Knopf, 2007); Black Maria (Knopf, 2005); To Repel Ghosts ("Remix," Knopf, 2005); Jelly Roll: a blues (Knopf, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; and Most Way Home (William Morrow, 1995), winner of the National Poetry Series and the Zacharis First Book Award.

Young's nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press November 14, 2017), is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" selection, and a "Best Book of 2017" by NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Dallas Morning News, Smithsonian,  Vogue, the Atlantic, Nylon, BuzzFeed, and Electric Literature. His previous nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (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.

Named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. His many other honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and an honorary doctorate from Beloit College.  

Kevin Young's Published Work