Kevin Young

Dates:

Born November 8, 1970

Georgia Connections

Decatur, DeKalb County

University Distinguished Professor at Emory University and Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library

Notes of Interest

Kevin Young is one of America's most highly regarded poets, and the prize-winning author of sixteen books of poetry and prose, and editor of ten others. 

Kevin Young was born in 1970 in Nebraska. He was graduated from Harvard in 1992 with an B.A. in English and American Literature, and from 1992-94 he was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He received his MFA from Brown University where he was a member of the African-American poetry group, "The Dark Room Collective." He taught at the University of Indiana and the University of Georgia before joining the faculty at Emory University. 

His first book of poetry, "Most Way Home," (1995) reflected to some degree the influence of Langston Hughes and was chosen as part of the National Poetry Series and won the John C. Zacharias First Book Prize from Ploughshares magazine. It was followed by "To Repel Ghosts" (2002), "Jelly Roll: A Blues" (2003, winner of the Patterson Prize), "Black Maria" (2005), "For the Confederate Dead" (2007, winner of both the Patterson Prize and the Quill Award for Poetry), "Dear Darkness: Poems" (2008) and "Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels" (2011). His poems have been included in numerous national publications including The New Yorker and Kenyon Review, and his work has appeared on National Public Radio. 

He is the editor of  acclaimed collections including "Blues Poems" (2003), "John Berryman: Selected Poems" (2004), "Jazz Poems" (2006), "The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing" (2010) and "Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers."

He currently serves as the Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. From 2021-2025, Kevin was the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. From 2016-2021, he was the director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. From 2005-2016, he served as Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library—a 75,000-volume collection of rare and modern poetry housed at Emory University. As curator, Young was responsible for growing the collection, running a reading series, and mounting exhibitions. In 2008, Young was also named Curator of Literary Collections, and continued to add to the outstanding growing collections at Emory’s Rose Library, which holds the archives of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes; National Book Award–winner Lucille Clifton; influential iconoclasts Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, and Salman Rushdie; Pulitzer Prize–winners Alice Walker, Natasha Trethewey, and Alan Dugan; and current British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

Named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, 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. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters. the Society of American Historians, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.