Schools

Emory's Kevin Young Wins Literary Award

Young won the 2013 PEN Open Book Award for his book, "The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness."

Kevin Young, a professor at Emory University, has won a major literary award.

Here's the information from Emory:

Emory University award winning poet Kevin Young has won the 2013 PEN Open Book Award for his book, "The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness," given by the PEN American Center, the largest branch of the world's leading literary and human rights organization.

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The award is given "for an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color published in 2012." Young is Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of literary collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory.

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Judges called "The Grey Album," published by Greywolf Press, "an ambitious, exhilarating, impassioned work of Black literary and cultural criticism, unlike any other—an inspired, sweeping book that deserves to be savored and celebrated."

Award winners will be honored at the 2013 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on Oct. 21 at CUNY Graduate Center's Proshansky Auditorium in New York City. Among the other recipients this year are Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo, former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, acclaimed playwright Larry Kramer, co-editors of Mother Jones Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, and sportswriter and NPR correspondent Frank DeFord.





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