Kevin Young, author portrait
© Melanie Dunea

Kevin Young

Kevin Young is Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library and poetry editor of The New Yorker. He is the former curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. His books of poetry include BrownDear Darkness, and Jelly Roll: A Blues. He has previously edited the anthology Blues Poems, Jazz Poems, and, for Library of America, John Berryman: Selected Poems. He will be the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture starting in January 2021.

Read Kevin Young’s Introduction to African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song

From the introduction:  The Difficult Miracle                                  This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America:  that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.                                                                                                 –June Jordan For over 250 years, African Americans have written and recited and published poetry about beauty and injustice, music and muses, Africa and America, freedoms

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