"An Evening with Kevin Young"

A groundbreaking voice of his generation, poet Kevin Young is the poetry editor of the New Yorker, where he hosts the poetry podcast. He was previously the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A National Book Award finalist and Guggenheim fellowship recipient, he also won the PEN Open Award, whose judge remarked that Young shows us “how Black identity is indispensable to American culture.”

Young will share personal insights into the state of poetry and creative thought; read his own poetry as well as works from African American Poetry 1770–2020: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, which he edited; and take audience questions.

Young is the author of 13 books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown (Knopf, 2018), as featured on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; and 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. His collection, Jelly Roll: a blues (Knopf, 2003), was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His newest book of poetry, Stones, was one of Library Journal's top 10 poetry titles of 2021 and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His new children's book is titled Emile and the Field (RHCB/Make Me a World, 2022), illustrated by Chioma Ebinama.

Young’s second nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was 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, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian, Vogue, The Atlantic, Nylon, BuzzFeed, and Electric Literature. 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.

Young is the editor of nine other collections, including The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965- 2010 (BOA Editions, 2012) and The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012). He is the editor of the anthology African American Poetry 1770–2020: 250 Years of Struggle & Song  (Library of America October 2020). He is series editor and wrote the introduction and forward for Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. In March 2021 he was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in May he was elected as a Fellow of the Society of American Historians.

This is Young's the first performance at the Moss Arts Center.