Poets & Writers Theater

In this Library of America video, Kevin Young discusses Claude McKay’s 1919 poem “If We Must Die,” the rhymes and the collective voice in lines such as, “Though far outnumbered let us show us brave.” This poem is included in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, an anthology edited by Young and published by the Library of America, which is featured in The Anthologist in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“A good bookseller absolutely is another kind of discoverer and thinker of history,” says Kevin Young in this trailer for The Booksellers. The documentary, directed by D. W. Young and executive produced by Parker Posey, explores the history, personalities, and business of bookselling in New York City.

“I think poetry should be part of popular culture, in the sense that poetry should be something we reach to.” Kevin Young, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, speaks about how his childhood in Topeka, Kansas influenced his new poetry collection, Brown (Knopf, 2018), with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown.

“Silence is the residue of fear. It is feeling your flaws, gut-wrench guillotine your tongue.” In this TED Talk, Clint Smith speaks about the danger of silence and finding the courage to speak up against ignorance and injustice. “The Poet at Work,” Smith’s profile of poet Kevin Young, is in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“So why not / make a soup / of what’s left? Why / not boil & chop / something outside / the mind...” Kevin Young reads “Ode to Gumbo” from his poetry collection Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008) at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.

In this video, poets Kevin Young, Evie Shockley, and Terrance Hayes participate in a roundtable symposium on newness in the creative arts and American expressive culture held at Brown University’s Granoff Center for the Creative Arts.

In this 2011 video, poet Kevin Young reads from his collection Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Random House, 2011) at the Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York.