Kevin Young
Poet and museum director
Kevin Young is an American poet who formerly led the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. He became poetry editor of The New Yorker in 2017.
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American Born 1970 in Lincoln, United States
About Kevin Young
Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on November 8, 1970. He finished at Harvard College in 1992, held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and took his MFA at Brown University. In Boston and Providence he belonged to The Dark Room Collective, an African-American poetry group. He has written poetry collections including Jelly Roll: A Blues, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Dear Darkness. He has also edited volumes such as Blues Poems, Jazz Poems and a selection of John Berryman's poems. His nonfiction includes The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, which the New York Times named a Notable Book. A Guggenheim Fellowship is among his honors. Young taught at the University of Georgia, Indiana University and Emory University, where he held the Atticus Haygood chair in English and Creative Writing and curated the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. He later directed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and then the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Bunk is among his books in our catalog.