Kevin Young

M.F.A., Poetry, Brown University
A.B., English, magna cum laude, Harvard University

Kevin Young is the author of sixteen books of poetry and prose, including Night Watch, winner of the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2026 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He is the poetry editor of The New Yorker, where he hosts the Poetry Podcast, and the editor of eleven other volumes, including A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925-2025 and the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song.

Young’s other books include Stones, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Jelly Roll: a blues, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry; Bunk a New York Times Notable Book, longlisted for the National Book Award, and winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction; and The Grey Album, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. His picture book, Emile and the Field, was named one of the “Best Children’s Books of 2022” by the New York Times.

From 2021-2025, Young was the Andrew W. Mellon 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, Young served as Candler Professor of Creative Writing and English at Emory University as well as Literary Curator and Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library—a 75,000-volume collection of rare and modern poetry housed at Emory’s Rose Library.

Over his decades-long career in archives and museums, he has helped acquire the archives of James Baldwin, Sonny Rollins, Lucille Clifton, Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, Salman Rushdie, Natasha Trethewey, Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, British Poets Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, performer and activist Harry Belafonte, the Johnson Publishing Company’s Ebony Test Kitchen, and the largest collection of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry in public hands.

His honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and the Harvard Arts medal. He holds honorary doctorates from Brown University, SUNY Purchase, and Beloit College. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Young is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Society of American Historians. 

updated July 2026