Kevin Young

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Kevin Young is a 3-Time AALBC.com Bestselling Author

Kevin Young was born November 8th, 1970 in Lincoln, Nebraska.  Young is a poet and teacher of poetry. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1992–1994), and received his Master of Fine Arts from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective. He is heavily influenced by the poets Langston Hughes, John Berryman, and Emily Dickinson and by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

He is also the author of several books of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011) and Jelly Roll: A Blues (Knopf, 2003), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. He has been called “a leading poet of his generation.” Young‘s poem “Ragtime” has been selected for the Poetry in Motion program and will be featured on MetroCards and in taxicab television screens across New York City starting in October 2012. The New York Public Library announced, on August 1st that;

Kevin Young will be joining NYPL [New York Public Library] as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He will begin his tenure at the Library in the late fall. Kevin succeeds Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who led the Schomburg with great distinction for the last five years.”

In January of 2021, Young took over as the director of the National Museum of African American History.

Learn more at Kevin Young’s official website



16 Books by Kevin Young