Thursday, September 18, 5pm

LOCATION: Rhodes-Rawling Auditorium, Klarman Hall KG70

The Fall 2025 Zalaznick Reading Series kicks off with a reading by Kevin Young
Kevin Young is the poetry editor of The New Yorker, where he hosts the poetry podcast, and is widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation. He was the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture from 2008 – 2016, and served as Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library—a 75,000-volume collection of rare and modern poetry housed at Emory University – from 2005 – 2016.
He is the author of sixteen books of poetry and prose, including Brown (Knopf, 2018); Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry; and Stones (Knopf, 2021) a Library Journal Top Ten poetry titles of 2021, and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Young is the editor of ten other volumes, including The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965- 2010 (BOA Editions, 2012), The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012), and African American Poetry 1770–2020: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, October 2020). He is series editor and wrote the introduction and forward for Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition. Most recently he was editor for A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925-2025 (Knopf, February 4, 2025).
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. In 2021 he was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and elected as a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. In 2024 he received the Harvard Arts Medal.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall