Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska and now lives in New York. He is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including Brown; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015; Book of Hours, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Jelly Roll: a blues, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry; Bunk, a New York Times Notable Book, and The Grey Album, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award. Kevin Young is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the poetry editor of the New Yorker. Stones (Cape Poetry, 2021) is the first of his poetry collections to be published in the UK. Night Watch, his latest collection, is published in 2025.
Shortlisted Works
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Judges Glyn Maxwell (Chair), Caroline Bird and Zaffar Kunial have chosen the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021 Shortlist from a record 177 poetry collections submitted by British and Irish publishers. The Shortlist consists of an eclectic mixture of established poets, none of whom has previously won the Prize, and...
