Kevin Young
Kevin Young was born on November 8, 1970, in Lincoln, Nebraska. He received his BA from Harvard University in 1992, where he studied poetry with Lucie Brock-Broido and Seamus Heaney, and his MFA in creative writing from Brown University in 1996.
Young’s poetry collections include Stones (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; Brown (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018); Book of Hours (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), winner of the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, given for the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States each year; To Repel Ghosts (Zoland Books, 2001), which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; and Most Way Home (Steerforth, 1995), selected for the National Poetry Series and winner of the Zacharis First Books Award from Ploughshares.
About Book of Hours, judge A. Van Jordan wrote:
As if walking through a gallery of grief, reverie, and transcendence, Kevin Young’s Book of Hours exemplifies what poetry can do in the world when language works at its full power. The poems in this collection hold emotion taut on each line while allowing for the nimbleness of language to drape over them, bringing tension between the heart and the mind, as Young consistently surprises us with profound elegance. Kevin Young is a master poet who has offered us a transformative curation of life, death and the ways in which we deal with it all in Book of Hours.
Young’s book of nonfiction Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017) was long-listed for the National Book Award. He has edited several anthologies, including A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925–2025 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025); African American Poetry 1770–2020: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020); The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (Bloomsbury, 2010); Blues Poems (Everyman’s Library, 2003); and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (Harper Perennial, 2000), as well as a selected volume of poems by John Berryman for Library of America. He is also the author of The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012), winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Award.
About Young’s work, the poet Lucille Clifton said, “This poet’s gift of storytelling and understanding of the music inherent in the oral tradition of language recreates for us an inner history which is compelling and authentic and American.”
Young’s other awards and honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
Young has taught at the University of Georgia, Indiana University, and Emory University, where he was the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of literary collections at the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. In 2020, Young was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He was the director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and currently serves as the poetry editor of The New Yorker. He is also currently the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).
