Kevin Young

Kevin Young joined The Wallace Foundation’s board of directors in 2025.

Young is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, and is the poetry editor of The New Yorker. His books include Stones (2021), Bunk (2017), Blue Laws (2016), Book of Hours (2014), and The Grey Album (2012). They have received numerous accolades, including the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and inclusion among the finalists for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has also been named New York Times Notable Book and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Young has served as the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Candler Professor of Creative Writing and English at Emory University, and curator of the university's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.

His other honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and the Harvard Arts medal. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Society of American Historians, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.

Photo credit: Melanie Dunea