Kevin Young

Kevin Young is an American poet, author, and director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1970, he studied at Harvard University with Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido, and received his MFA from Brown University. He is the author of more than ten poetry collections, including Dear Darkness (2008), Book of Hours (2014), and Brown (2018). Young's nonfiction book Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (2017) is a wide-ranging cultural history of American fraud, deception, and hoax culture from P.T. Barnum to the twenty-first century, with particular attention to how race and racism have enabled and shaped American con artistry. The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 2018 and was widely praised for its erudition, its cultural range, and its striking contemporary relevance in the era of 'fake news.' Young has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and many other institutions. He lives in Washington, D.C.