A member of the Dark Room Collective as a young writer, Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, grew up largely in Topeka, Kansas, and studied under Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido at Harvard University before earning an MFA at Brown. Book of Hours (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011) won an American Book Award. His nonfiction study Bunk (Graywolf Press, 2017) received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He directed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and serves as poetry editor of The New Yorker.
