Kevin Young

Kevin Young is Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library and poetry editor of The New Yorker. His books of poetry include Brown, Dear Darkness, and Jelly Roll: A Blues. He has previously edited the anthology Blues Poems, Jazz Poems, and, for Library of America, John Berryman: Selected Poems. Expertly selected by poet and scholar Kevin Young African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America) is an unprecedented anthology capturing the breadth and range of African American poetry. It’s a precious living heritage revealed in all its power, beauty, and multiplicity. It arcs from the work of an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley, confronting her legal status in verse, to the voice of antebellum activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to the provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion stretching from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and beyond. Enjoy the varied but distinctly Black music of a tradition that draws deeply from jazz, hip hop, and the rhythms and cadences of the pulpit, the barbershop, and the street. African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song sets a new standard for a genuinely deep engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius. TIME magazine praised Kevin Young and his anthology as “an exhilarating collection of voices that have helped shape the country, many of whom never got their full due. By including new forms and overlooked schools, Young’s anthology promises to rewrite the history of American verse.”