Kevin Young, the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta, has won the 2013 PEN Open Book Award from the PEN American Center. The award is given annually for “an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color.” Professor Young was honored for his book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press).
Professor Young is the author of seven collections of poetry and is the editor of seven other published collections. At Emory, he also serves as the curator of literary collections and curator at the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.
Professor Young is a graduate of Harvard University and holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Brown University.
As a friend of the novelist and filmmaker Laleh Khadivi, who taught alongside Young at Emory, I was introduced to Young’s brilliant work in 2008 and 2009 and have been an interested reader ever since. I am very glad to see this award come his way. It’s frankly disappointing that Young’s work is not better known and more widely read by now.