Kevin Young

Kevin Young is the poetry editor at The New Yorker and the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He has published ten books of poetry, including Jelly Roll: A BluesBlue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015 (2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; and, most recently, Brown (2018).

Young has also written two award-winning books of non-fiction: The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (2012), the winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (2017), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was named a “Best Book of 2017” by, among others, the LA Times, Vogue, the Atlantic, and Electric Literature. Young’s many other honors include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and an honorary doctorate from Beloit College.