Kevin Young

Award-winning Author and Poet
Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Thursday, February 21, 4:00 pm
Livak Ballroom, Davis Center
University of Vermont

On February 21 at 4:00 pm, Silver Special Collections and the Department of English are pleased to present Kevin Young, award-winning poet, New Yorker poetry editor, author of the bestselling Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News, and Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Young will be giving a public lecture, "BROWN: Adventures in Being," discussing his experience documenting American culture through his unique perspective as a poet, essayist, editor, curator, and Schomburg Director.

Kevin Young is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at New York Public Libraries and Poetry Editor of the New Yorker. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown (Knopf, 2018); Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; and Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. His collection Jelly Roll: a blues (Knopf, 2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Young’s nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” selection, and a “Best Book of 2017″ by NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian, Vogue, the Atlantic, Nylon, BuzzFeed, and Electric Literature. Young’s previous nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012), won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award; it was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. 

Young is the editor of eight other collections, most recently The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 (BOA Editions, 2012) and The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012). Named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.

The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Silver Special Collections at uvmsc@uvm.edu or (802) 656-2138.

The talk is part of the Dan and Carole Burack Presidents’s Distinguished Lecture Series, and is sponsored by Silver Special Collections and the Department of English.