September 25, 5:30–7:00 PM
Center for the Study of the American South
410 E. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill
Free & open to the public

Celebrating Southern Cultures’s Arts & Letters issue with featured poet Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker. The author of sixteen books of poetry and prose, Young will read from his new book and join SC editor Regina N. Bradley in conversation. Refreshments provided. Books will be available for purchase from Letters Bookshop.

Co-sponsored by the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Creative Writing Program, and the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History

Kevin Young is the author of sixteen books of poetry and prose, including Night Watch, winner of the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2026 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He is the poetry editor of The New Yorker, where he hosts the Poetry Podcast, and the editor of eleven volumes, including A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925–2025 and the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. Young is currently the Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. Starting in fall 2026, Young will serve as the Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale University, a post formerly held by Nobel laureate Louise Glück.

From 2021–2025, Young was the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. From 2016-2021, he was the director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. From 2005-2016, Young served as Candler Professor of Creative Writing and English at Emory University as well as Literary Curator and Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library—a 75,000-volume collection of rare and modern poetry housed at Emory’s Rose Library.

Regina N. Bradley, an award-winning writer and researcher of the Black American South, is an alumna Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow (Hutchins Center, Harvard University, Spring 2016), associate professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University, a faculty editor for Southern Cultures journal, and cohost of the southern hip hop podcast Bottom of the Map with music journalist Christina Lee. A leading scholar on contemporary southern Black life and hip hop culture, Bradley has discussed her work on a range of media outlets, including NPR, Netflix’s hip hop docuseries Hip-Hop Evolution, Washington Post, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In May 2017, Bradley delivered a TEDx talk, “The Mountaintop Ain’t Flat,” about hip hop in the American Black South. She is the author of Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South, the editor of An OutKast Reader, and coeditor of the third edition of That’s the Joint!: The Hip Hop Studies Reader, with Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal.