“Deep SongBelief is what buries us—that& the belief in belief—No longerdo I trust liltlessness—leewardis the world'sway—Go onplunge in—the lungs willlet us float.Joy is the mile-high ledgethe leap—a breathabove the lip of the abandonedquarry—beliefthe dark the deep.”

American poet and editor

Kevin Young is an American poet and editor. He has held major cultural posts, including director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and, earlier, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. He has written 11 books and edited eight others. Young was a finalist for the National Book Award for his 2003 collection Jelly Roll: A Blues, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also taught at Emory University as Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, curated Emory’s Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, and became poetry editor of The New Yorker in March 2017.