Kevin Young

Kevin Young is the author of a previous book of nonfiction, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, which won the PEN Open Book Award, was recognized as a New York Times Notable Book, and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He is the author of 11 books of poetry, including Brown and Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015. From 2016-2020 he served as the director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Young is the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and poetry editor of the New Yorker, where he also hosts the poetry podcast.