Young, Kevin

Kevin Young is the author of 14 books, including Brown: Poems; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015; Book of Hours: Poems; Jelly Roll: a blues – a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry; Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Post-Facts, and Fake News; and The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. The poetry editor of The New Yorker, Young is the editor of nine other volumes, most recently the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. In his latest collection, Stones: Poems (Knopf Publishing Group), he offers an ode to his home places and his dear departed, and to what of them – of us – poetry can save. Whether it’s the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection) or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. The Los Angeles Times called Stones a “book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, called one of the poetry stars of his generation.”