Kevin Young
Kevin Young

Blackface remains exoticist and offensive as a practice, not just because of its long tradition of being used to mock black selfhood, sexuality, and speech but because of its assertion that black people are merely white people sullied by dark skin.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, 'Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.'

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe - but not secret.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

One of the most troubling things about the term 'fake news' is that it has become a force field against accusations you don't like.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

It's a black Southern belief that blue glass keeps out bad spirits.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

While claiming advocacy, what hoaxers really exhibit is self-interest. Often, this is because there is only the self to support their false claims; any revelations merely provide further opportunities for details and forgery.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

I write about what hoaxers do, but I also want us to think about what believers do. Why do we want to believe a story like James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces?' Why did we want to believe that Lance Armstrong really did all these things that, looking back, seemed impossible?

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

Rereading 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was struck by what I had forgotten of the book: in a manner of pages, we encounter shame, history, ruin, conflicting stories, and wounds badly healed; in short, the South.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.'

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

The mid-eighteen-thirties marked the rise of eugenics and racialism, with phrenology emerging as just one of the many pseudosciences that sought to enact, reinforce, and restrict racial difference.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

I was a professor for 20 years, 12 of those at Emory University.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

Writers need their totems, their altars. Mine, I feel, share the same randomness and utility of those belonging to painters I know, who are relentlessly visual and even poetic.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

We've learned quickly that the Web is far more pseudonymous than anonymous: online, our names have simply been changed to a number, an I.P. address, protocol, and code.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

Listen to the late Isaac Hayes covering 'Walk on By' by Burt Bacharach or Mayfield singing The Carpenters' vanilla-seeming 'We've Only Just Begun,' and you realize soul's insistence on transformation: Mayfield in particular makes the song not just about love but the start of revolution.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

There's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing.

Kevin Young
Kevin Young

What a poem can do is provide you this intimate eye that, for the length of a poem and hopefully a little bit after, can provide testimony or a point of view.