MACON, Ga. — Mercer University’s Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies will award the 2026 Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature to poet and author Kevin Young. The prize will be presented Feb. 10 at 6:30 p.m. in the University’s Presidents Dining Room.
Widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation, Young is the poetry editor of The New Yorker, where he also hosts the poetry podcast, and he is Global Distinguished Professor in the New York University Creative Writing Program.
“In West African culture, a griot is a living archive, a person who maintains culture, history, and traditions through oral performance. Kevin Young is a griot for contemporary America,” said Dr. David A. Davis, chair of the Robinson Prize Committee. “His work as an editor, archivist and curator catalogs a rich tradition of African American culture, and his poems depict the pain and beauty of the Black experience in America.”
The Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature recognizes writers who have engaged and extended the long, often complicated, tradition of writing about the South. The selection committee for the Robinson Prize includes Mercer professors, eminent scholars of Southern literature and members of the Macon community.
Young is renowned as a leading curator of African American literature and culture. He served as Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library — a 75,000-volume collection of rare and modern poetry housed at Emory University — from 2005-2016. He was the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, an 11-million-item collection of materials focused on African American, African Diasporic and African experiences, from 2008-2016. Additionally, he was Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the world’s largest museum dedicated to African-American history and culture, from 2021-2025.
He is the author of sixteen books of poetry and prose, including Brown; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry; and Stones, a Library Journal Top Ten poetry titles of 2021, and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
His collection Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His book, Night Watch: Poems, was selected as both a New York Times Editor’s Choice and one of their Notable Books of 2025.
Young’s second nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in nonfiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was named a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian, Vogue, Atlantic, Nylon, BuzzFeed, and Electric Literature.
Young’s previous nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award. It was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. His children’s book Emile and the Field was one of the New York Times’ Best Children’s Books of 2022.
Young is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. In 2021, he was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and elected as a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. In 2024 he received the Harvard Arts Medal. In 2025, he was given an honorary Degree of Letters from Brown University.
