“We had moved cross-country from upstate New York to Kansas in the heat wave of 1980, with two cars, no air-conditioning, and a black dog. I can still see the infernal temperature of a hundred and nineteen degrees on a bank sign somewhere near Ohio.”

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.