There’s also another idea coursing through The Grey Album about a hidden African-American tradition-and a tradition of hiding-that I call storying. If I started with that idea, I ended up trying to name not just what’s black about American culture, but what was black about black culture. I do think people needed reminding of the ways, say, in which the blues not only influenced American music-and, through jazz, world music-but the ways the blues aesthetic underpins much of what we think of as modernism, from T.S. The 2013 MTV Video Music Awards were on the other night, and I don’t ever recall seeing so much black music played by people who weren’t black. I didn’t think this was so radical: just turn on (or is it stream?) the radio, and it becomes obvious.

Kevin Young: A big question! My starting assumption with The Grey Album was that African-American culture is a central part of American culture. Could you provide a couple of examples that the book explores in depth? And you do so partly by pointing out that art plays a central role in our lives. He answered questions from Chapter 16 via email:Ĭhapter 16: The judges’ citation for the 2013 PEN Open Award said this about The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness: “Here’s what happens when an acclaimed poet makes his first foray into nonfiction: madcap manifesto and rhapsodic reportage create a formidable blend of scholarship and memoir that tackles cultural and personal history in one breath.” In this book, you explain how Black Identity is not a separate part of American culture, arguing that it is our culture. Currently, Young serves as the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta. His latest book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, was a 2012 New York Times notable book, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and most recently the winner of the 2013 PEN Open Award. Young’s poetry books have won many awards, including a 2012 National Book Award for Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels. Whether he is talking about Modernism, blues singers, the slave ship Amistad, film noir, or one of many other subjects he has studied, he writes poems and essays that simultaneously serve as portals to the past and future. Author of seven books of poetry and an essay collection, and editor of eight more books, Young does work that embodies an inclusive sense of literary history and illustrates the interconnectivities between art and life. Ambitious yet grounded, scholarly yet impassioned, cerebral yet also playful, Kevin Young is one of those rare writers who does it all, and does it all well, including tweets about The Bachelorette.

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