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Audio Recording of "Negative" by Kevin Young

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Audio Recording of "Negative" by Kevin Young

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Analytical Reflection of Ode to the Midwest

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Analytical Reflection of Ode to the Midwest

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Academy of American Poets. www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/kevin-young.

"Kevin Young." The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/contributors/kevin-young. Accessed 16 May 2019.

"Kevin Young." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kevin-young. Accessed 16 May 2019.

"Kevin Young Extended Bibliography." Kevin Young Poetry, kevinyoungpoetry.com/extended-biography.html. Accessed 16 May 2019.

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Kaveh Akbar Reads Ellen Bryant Voight with Kevin Young

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Kaveh Akbar Reads Ellen Bryant Voight with Kevin Young

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Kaveh Akbar joins Kevin Young to read and discuss Ellen Bryant Voigt's poem " Groundhog" and his own poem " What Use Is Knowing Anything If No One Is Around." Akbar is the author of the poetry collection "Calling a Wolf a Wolf," as well as the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2018 Levis Reading Prize.
Below is an automated transcript of this podcast episode.
Kevin Young: Hello. You're listening to The New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine on this podcast we asked poets to choose a poem for the magazine's archives to read and discuss along with a piece of their own that we published in The New Yorker. My guest today is Kaveh Akbar who has received a Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship a Pushcart Prize and the 2018 Levis, that's Larry Levis, reading prize. Welcome Kaveh.

Kaveh Akbar: Thank you so much for having me on. Great pleasure to be here.

Kevin: We're happy to have you. So the poem you decide to read for us is Groundhog by Ellen Bryant Voigt.

Kaveh: Yeah.

Kevin: What in particular drew you to this piece.

Kaveh: Yeah I encountered this piece early in my relatively early, in my, I mean I'm still early in my poetry journey but I encountered it years ago when it first appeared in The New Yorker and it was one of those poems that just arrives like an angels blaring trumpet, you know it just sort of absolutely ripped the top of my head off and it was just my first encounter with language that felt so charged in that played with momentum so intelligently in the centripetal force and the inertia in this poem is just so incantatory and so magical.

Kevin: Well let's hear it let's hear it. Here's Kaveh Akbar reading "Groundhog" by Ellen Bryant Voigt.
Kaveh Akbar reads "Groundhog."
Kevin: That was Groundhog by Ellen Bryant Voigt which ran in the February 14th, 2011, issue of the magazine. So I can hear what drew you into it. I mean there's this discussion of language and what we call things that sort of strikes me first but also nature I think as nature you know she's trying I think in a poem to or the poem is trying to make us feel it. You know it's enacting the thing that it's describing sort of describing a groundhog. It is a groundhog.

Kaveh: Yeah. You think of the great deep familiars pronouncement to make the stone stonie right. Victor Shalosky an artist's technique and I've never felt a groundhog to be so groundhog-y as in this poem right. You never feel, you never feel the groundhog-yness. It's never so apparent as it is in this poem but just all of nature is like that. Right. And you encounter the way that taxonomy kind of flattens and the way that a poem can kind of really give texture and really give life. It does the opposite of what taxonomy does.

Kevin: I love that. I mean the first line ends with the word frolicking and then in that way I think the poem does that but for a serious purpose there is that one single line in the midst of the poem "attacked he looks to me inedible. He shares his acreage." There's these kind of shifts within that line you know attacked. He looks to me inedible. You know he is sort of benevolent. And then at the end of course, fluffy like girls maybe he is a she. It matters what we're called. What do you make of that in the end.

Kaveh: The whole project of the poem seems to me to be about naming. The power of naming and the impotence of naming right. What what can and can't giving something a name to it matters what we're called word shapes the thought don't say rodent and ruin everything right to call a groundhog a rodent right. But then you know there's that riff about if Jesus came back. How would people encounter him. Would people call him these names. You know there is an intense power in naming. You know this is a this is an idea that we see reverberating throughout a lot of contemporary poetry as more and more poets are thinking about identity and more and more of the conversation is orbiting these ideas of identity. You know there's the famous phrase from Selma Sharif's "Look" where she says it matters what we call a thing right. This attention to naming names are not inert, names have intense political power names have intense social power and connotative power. And I think that this poem is very sort of invested in that idea sort of orbits these centers of intensity and then pulls loose and then comes back into these moments of real real intensity.

Kevin: And she says doesn't matter what they're called high like swine who you know. I think the breaks in this poem are so strong and perfect and you read them well which is to say you gave us a sense of the breaks in the flow down the page which is both flowing but also interrupted or maybe orchestrated is the best term but this idea of swine which of course is an insult as is rodent to humans, let's say, it's fascinating that she's reclaiming in different parts but also I was thinking while you were saying this because there is this other human conversation happening that flows through this poem. But you know why make nature bear language. But you know of course it has to.

Kaveh: Yeah of course it has to and the form of this is very invested in that idea too right? It is the sort of very organic feeling rush of language that seems to just have erupted it's very sort of dionysian and you know and it's very sort of urgent and that's the supersaturated rush of language from Ellen Bryant Voigt who's a great formalist you know Kyrei is this long string of beautiful sonnets you know, she's This great formalist who's made an incredible career writing these rending punctuated poems.

Kevin: Right.

Kaveh: And here she is no punctuation on the page no visibly demarcated punctuation on the page. But when you when you really roll up your sleeves and think about what she's doing here there is a punctuation there is an order and it's completely organic to the language itself which I think is an incredible achievement.

Kevin: I think, Kyrei, her book is sort of a lament a sonnet sequence about the influenza epidemic in 1919. It really is a beautiful haunting piece. Which if it was like this be almost overwhelming and there's a way in which the control there lets her have this is it freedom or is it as you say organic, I mean both are organic in their own settings. I think two of the late Donald Hall has the great poem without him where suddenly in the midst of this grief he is just listing the things that are he's with without around his late wife Jane Kenyon the terrific poet. And here there is a kind of mournfulness but also a playfulness that I think you're reading really captured.

Kaveh: Yeah yeah. Well I talk all the time to my students about Horace's pronouncement that a poem should delight and instruct right. These are the two poles of a poem right. But these are the two engines that drive poetry right. And this poem exemplifies both of those so beautifully you could read this poem to an eight year old to a fave year old and they would be delighted by the language. They would smile. They would be bobbing their heads. They would be responding to the rhythms into the cadences. You know this poem is so so delightful. But as we've discussed you know it's also saying something really really pown hard and true.

Kevin: What do you think about delight in poems.

Kaveh: I think it's essential. I think that oftentimes a poet will sort of get on their horse and gallop off towards wisdom and instruction. Right and leave delight in the dust or you know neglect delight in the dust. I know that my worst poems my failed poems that is often what is ailing them. You know. But, you know so much of what poetry is for me begins into life. You know I think about Richard Pryor the comedian who said he would get you laughing so that your mouth be open so he could pour the poison down right.

Kevin: Yeah.

Kaveh: Isn't that perfect. I mean isn't that exactly what a poem does.

Kevin: Pryor does that exactly.

Kaveh: I know. I know. Yes. So does a good poem A good poem gets you delighted, it makes you permeable to the instruction to the wisdom through an encounter with unprecedented language your unprecedented experience right which is the form that delight often takes in a poem.

Kevin: Yeah no don't stop.

Kaveh: I mean it's just it's just it's such a load bearing element of how a poem works right has to gain purchase to your consciousness through delight through delighting you again by delight I don't mean a puppy's wagging tail or a baby's pink toes. You know I mean.

Kevin: It's not easy. Delight.

Kaveh: Yeah. No it's not easy. Delight at all. That's the title of of a collection of essays, it's not easy delight. Yeah.

Kevin: You know it's sort of familiarising I think and some of what the poem, this particular poem does, is it starts out sort of in the midst not unlike otters which is the you know this is not an essay in that way it is starting you in the midst but also with this double negative. You know. And I think that's I love a good double negative because we use them all the time and learn in speech but sometimes we sit down and we write. And it's not even just that we get on a horse and gallop away from delight we get on a high horse like well you know you start making if not pronouncements then your language becomes much more in a limited way sort of formal it's like well my joke about when people get into court are like on a TV court show suddenly they exit their vehicle and proceed to you know, exit, you know, instead of like getting out of your car and there's a way in which by letting this language sort of float there she really lets us float.

Kaveh: Yeah yeah and you sort of just whirl through the miasma right like there is this great centripetal force in this poem and the wisdom that it imparts the story that it tells is cumulative right it's not linear but it's orbital which I think is is astonishing.

Kevin: I love that and it's a great way to put it. Well let's turn to another poem by a poet we like the June 5th 2017 issue the new yorker published your poem "What Use is Knowing Anything If No One is Around," which you'll read for us shortly. Is there anything you'd like to say about the piece first anything that might be helpful for listeners going in.

Kaveh: Just that I'm grateful you guys took a chance on it.

Kevin: Here's Kaveh Akbar reading his poem "What Use is Knowing Anything if No One is Around."

Kaveh Akbar reads "What Use is Knowing Anything if No One is Around."(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/what-use-is-knowing-anything-if-no-one-is-around)

Kevin: "What Use is Knowing Anything if No One is Around" by Kaveh Akbar. Well that's such a wonderful poem and so great to hear it. So much for me to think about, one of the things I want to talk with you about is a bit about language. You have great language throughout the poem I love especially my escape was mundane then voidable I suppose you know a word we'd never use is the opposite unavoidable. How is that use of language tied to this signing Quranic verse after Quranic verse his syllables that start the poem so curious about that.

Kaveh: Yeah well this poem not unlike the Voigt maybe not to the same effect as the Voigt or not with the same dexterity as the Voigt but not unlike the Voigt is sort of orbital right. It's sort of moving a elliptically around these centres of intensity more than passing directly through a linear narrative. And I think that it's very sort of invested in the way that rhythm and cadence can lead to real insight. You know Reilke said the true problems in life are never fully solved but some states can be resolved rhythmically right. And I think that this poem is very invested in that promise. You know it builds the sort of cadence and it brings in all of these things you know my struggling with Islam as a child my struggling with Islam as a man. You know my addiction and my recovery my you know my love life my spiritual life it all comes into this braid you know you don't have a separate lobe of your brain for each of these ideas, right, it all just sort of mixes in there and builds synapses across so...

Kevin: You can't see but he he's literally pointing at his brain through his nice hair. I think that's true in the Pullmans almost you know it's an acting that you know I love a poem that enacts what it doesn't describe. Is that sort of the state of the lyric is the lyric for you this orbital idea or the centripetal or centrifugal thing.

Kaveh: Yeah yeah. I think often about this atomic model of the poem where the language is this cloud of electrons just sort of orbiting around this nucleus and you can tell what's at the center of the atom by watching the behavior of those electrons right. You can't look at aggression earned and say this is a poem about agression earned, right. You look at it you look at that poem and you say this is a poem about temporality and stuff but you know that temporality and death and legacy.

Kevin: You know all the things.

Kaveh: All the things right. But you know that not because as he's saying this is a poem about temporality and death but.

Kevin: Right, that would be not a poem.

Kaveh: That would be an anti-poem that would be moving linearly and not orbatially, right. I think that oftentimes great poems move orbitally.

Kevin: Yeah. I love that you kind of bring us to that when you say this is why we put mirrors in bird cages why we turn on lamps to double our shadows. I love my body more than other bodies and this mirroring that the poem is doing. I mean it's both in effect the poem is doing it's mirroring experience rather than you know showing it to us I suppose. But also these lamps, I mean these are all such loaded, I mean anyone else would get there and be like, I'm done with my poem. That would be the end of my bad poem. I would hope that I would get to the point of I love my body more than other bodies but that's really in the throes of this connectivity.

Kaveh: Yeah yeah. Well that that phrase that throws I'm getting goose bumps as you say that, you know. That phrase "The throws" is exactly what I aspire towards. You know there's this line from Nietzsche where he talks about recruiting Apollo to capture a moment with clarity that Dionisys would destroy in ecstasy. Right. Right. And so like that sort of Apollonian clarity. Right. Even though I feel very much in the throes writing and remembering these things I feel very much in the throes, but form you know craftedness that comes in through through the organization of the poem right. And that is, that recruiting of Apollo you know.

Kevin: Well I'm glad you mention the word ecstasy because when I read your work this piece of course but also your work in your book calling a wolf a wolf. I think about ecstasy a lot. How do you capture that or are you trying to just you know capture it so you don't destroy it are you trying to destroy it by capturing it.

Kaveh: Fascinating question.

Kevin: Sorry I asked only that easy one.

Kaveh: Yeah. Clearly clearly. Yeah. I mean so much of my life was spent just lurching from ecstasy to crisis to ecstasy to crisis and nothing in between those two things really sounded through my dense fog of knowing. You know, it had to be one poll or the other. You know, for me to really really perceive it. And this book is about recovery from that state. Right. And so everything was so muted. Everything was so suppressed feeling, right.

Kevin: You're saying before this book or...

Kaveh: I'm saying in the writing of this book in this state of my life, when you, know nothing was that intense of an ecstasy or that that deep of a despair.

Kevin: Yeah.

Kaveh: You know I had these well-tried psychic algorithms for despair and I had these well-tried psychic algorithms for pure ecstasy, right. But I didn't know what to do in the middle ground, you know, and the poems were sort of where I worked that out right. Some states can be resolved rhythmically right. This is where I went to figure out what to do with myself and literally it's where I put my body you know if I'm writing a poem for 10 hours I'm not putting my body in places where it shouldn't be. You know, it was it was a place to put my mind but also to to occupy my physiological self until it could sort of figure out how to be a person again.

Kevin: That's really interesting because what you're describing to me is not the poem as a safe place, you know, but it is a respite but also a kind of middle ground. I mean is that how you think of it?

Kaveh: Yeah absolutely. I like the word respite. I think that there is a way in which a lot of my old obsessions and Compulsivity is just kind of sublimated into obsessions and compulsivity is around writing, you know.

Kevin: Sure.

Kaveh: Which which persists to this day. They haven't gone anywhere. It's still wired the same way but now I can occupy myself, you know, for 18 hours a day just talking about poems and teaching poems and writing poems and reading poems and nothing makes me happier. Truly truly.

Kevin: Sure.

Kaveh: Yeah.

Kevin: We're addicted to poems too.

Kaveh: Which is easier on our livers, mostly.

Kevin: Mostly, you know I hear that. I think more importantly I see that in the work. I can see how you're on the page and this poem is a great example. Working that out the word that comes to mind is almost knitting. And here where you say there has always been a swarm of hungry ghosts orbiting my body we have this orbiting again. But also this this lurking danger. And I love that. It's not a it's a metaphor in the sense that it feels very real. And then you say even now I can feel them plotting and their luminous diamonds of fog each eyeing a rib or a thighbone. And then there are the worms that you know which is always at the end I suppose, but here they've become kind of sacrificial lambs as it were. You know that phenomenon of them coming up from the wet earth always fascinates. But here you know they're sort of welcoming angels. I don't know how do you view them?

Kaveh: Well it's so strange right that worms come out of the soil when it's wet right which ultimately puts them at great peril. Yeah right. You know which seemed very in keeping with my story you know.

Kevin: Well I love that you're writing about addiction or recovery, but in a way not capital A or maybe it's capital A you know you're writing about it in the human part of it and not as a subject but as a true trial, a journey.

Kaveh: One of the really beautiful terrible things about recovery is that it kind of disabuse you of the notion that your addiction story is in any way singular. I mean this book doesn't do a lot of war storying. It's not a lot you know snorting this or that drug off the bathroom tile. You know I have those stories every every addict, you know everyone has those stories. The really interesting stuff to me is sort of putting the pieces together afterwards and you know I could have died and I didn't know what poet isn't obsessed with death and rebirth. And the potential for each you know these are the things that really fascinate me.

Kevin: The poem What I love about it. You know we talk a little bit about form with the Voigt your form is very strict at least stanzaicially speaking here. Were you thinking about that? Did that come at the start or happen along the way?

Kaveh: Yeah well so much of this book is much looser and so much of this book works through these long rushes of unpunctuated language is not unlike the Voigt who is a huge influence. Sure. Especially headwater the book from which groundhog comes from. But this poem is more of that sort of Apollonian bridling of those impulses right. I think that you can feel the poem sort of pushing up against the seams of its form a little bit right. And I think that I'm very very interested in that kind of tension. The musician Brian Eno talks about the crack in a blues singers voice being a recorded moment of an emotional event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it. Right? Which is extraordinary right. That's the perfect way to describe that and I'm so so invested in figuring out how to put those moments into the poems right. Like where can you feel the poem bristling against its form and where can you feel it trying to grow out of its medium you know.

Kevin: Well, it's like Coltrane's High Sea. I mean the straining in "A Love Supreme" when he's hitting that note which I won't try to duplicate. You know is it like, if you hear that you don't want to write something. Yeah I don't know who you are.

Kaveh: Yeah.

Kevin: I'm curious to then about because I think a lot about Elizabeth Bishop. I mean I do that anyway but I think that sometimes people, a poet who struggled with addiction but who often gets read as this kind of polite nature poet almost, when off course the power to me of the poems is that roiling as you putting it pushing up against the form and you know only a poet who knows, is it terror? Can write so calmly so calmly about terror in a way. And I think it's really we we sometimes take the surface too literally both with her and other formal poets.

Kaveh: Yeah yeah well and Bishop, one of the great gestures that I've borrowed or stolen from her...

Kevin: We all have.

Kaveh: Yeah yeah yeah. Is Vijay Seshadri calls it her rhetorical hesitancy, you know how she will sort of make a gesture and then sort of retreat from it, you know in advance and retreat or she will make a declaration and then take it back and modify it a little bit. So like in this poem you know when I sleep next to a man he becomes an extension of my own brilliance or rather, he becomes an echo, you know that's pure Bishop, that's me just cribbing Bishop, you know. And that sort of rhetorical hesitancy is really important to me because it's so unmooring right it so it puts the reader sort of on their heels a bit, I'm very interested in that gesture.

Kevin: Well I wonder just to turn and maybe end with thinking about language how much that has to do with thinking about language in multiple ways and I see that in your signing language. The Speaker let's call it you, is covering his ears. I mean how is that you know do you think about and I've heard you talk elsewhere about language and your relationship to your many languages of origin. How do you talk about that or think about that in terms of these poems?

Kaveh: Yeah yeah well you know the boy sitting in the corner covering his ears right. It's about silence it's about, I mean when you cover your ears you literally lose language, right you lose the ability to hear language and you know my first language was Farsi which is a language that I lost right. We spoke Arabic in prayer in our household but none of us actually understood Arabic. We can make the sounds we could make the corresponding physiological gesticulations of prayer. But we, but none of us actually knew literally what we were saying you know which is a fascinating relationship to a language right which is another sort of way of covering your ears to the semantic meeting of the language and only experiencing it sonically right. So these are all sort of ways of warping language right, of of covering one's years. You know that that gesture seems really potent to me really charged and sort of encapsulates a lot of my relationship to language and my relationship to silence to which I think is a load-bearing element of how I think about poems.

Kevin: And silence speaks, and I think it speaks here beautifully and the rest of your work. Thank you so much for being here.

Kaveh: This is thrilling.

Kevin: [00:28:00] We can talk about this all day and night. "What Use is Knowing Anything if No One is Around," by Kaveh Akbar as well as Ellen Bryant Voigt's poem "Groundhog," can be found on New York dot com. Ellen Bryant Voigt's most recent poetry collection is "Headwaters." Kaveh Akbar's latest is "Calling a Wolf a Wolf." Thanks very much.

Tag: You may subscribe to this podcast, the Fiction podcast, the Writer's Voice podcast, and the Politics and More podcast by searching for The New Yorker in your podcast app. You can hear more poetry read by the authors on newyorker.com and on The New Yorker app, available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is the corner by Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah courtesy of Stretch Music and Rope a Dope. The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Jill Du Boff of newyorker.com with help from Hannah Aizenman.

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Kaveh Akbar joins Kevin Young to read and discuss Ellen Bryant Voigt's poem " Groundhog" and his own poem " What Use Is Knowing Anything If No One Is Around." Akbar is the author of the poetry collection "Calling a Wolf a Wolf," as well as the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2018 Levis Reading Prize.

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Can Kevin Young Make Poetry Matter Again?

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Can Kevin Young Make Poetry Matter Again?

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On August 25, 1835, residents of New York City woke to the sound of newsboys howling about an astonishing discovery. According to The New York Sun, a British astronomer had discovered life on the moon. Using a giant telescope outfitted with an ingenious "hydro-oxygen" mechanism, the newspaper said, Sir John Herschel had "affirmatively settled" the question of whether the moon was inhabited.

The Sun narrated its account of Herschel's discoveries over six days. Among the astronomer's findings were "not less than thirty-eight species of forest trees," horned bears, and beavers walking on two legs. On the fourth day, the paper reported the discovery of humanoid creatures with batlike wings and faces that were "a slight improvement upon that of the large orang outang." On the sixth day, two more races of bat-men were described. One was larger than the first, "less dark in color, and in every respect an improved variety." The other was more attractive still, "scarcely less lovely than the general representations of angels by the more imaginative schools of painters."

Though Sir John Herschel was a real astronomer, the Sun's account-published without his knowledge-was, of course, fake news. What came to be known as the Great Moon Hoax was intended as satire, but much like Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast a century later, the story was taken for truth. It was copied by other newspapers, translated into foreign languages, and debated by learned astronomical societies. Edgar Allan Poe called it "decidedly the greatest hit in the way of sensation-of merely popular sensation-ever made by any similar fiction either in America or in Europe."

In his new book, Bunk, a cultural history of hoaxes in America, the poet Kevin Young argues that the popularity of the Sun's story "owed much to its re-creating on the Moon what many white readers believed could be found at home." With the hoax's distinction of ethnic groupings among the bat-men, he says, "it is tempting to see the lunar humanoids as hierarchical in the ways white eugenicists characterized races on earth." For Young, the implication of race at the center of what is sometimes described as America's first great hoax is no accident. As he proposes near the end of Bunk, "You could go so far as to say that the hoax is racism's native tongue."

One afternoon this past summer, I met Young in the lobby of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, which he has directed since 2016. It was a cloudless day, hot enough that I was sweating under my sport coat. Young, more intelligently, was wearing a plaid shirt rolled up to the elbows. On one arm he wore an Apple Watch, on the other a leather cuff.

Like Bunk, which was longlisted for the National Book Award two months before its publication, next week, Young has had his share of precocious success. He won an award from the American Academy of Poets during his freshman year at Harvard, and the poems he wrote to satisfy his thesis requirement were selected for publication in the National Poetry Series. Now forty-seven, he possesses a résumé that reads like a passport stamped on a Grand Tour of institutional high culture, with stops at Harvard, Stanford (a Stegner Fellowship), Brown (an MFA), Emory (a named professorship), and the Schomburg. He has published ten collections of his own poems, edited eight volumes of others', and, with Bunk, written two massive volumes of nonfiction. Capping off this run, he has just taken over as the poetry editor of The New Yorker.

And yet while Young has accomplished enough, quickly enough, to suggest a man in a hurry, in person there is nothing rushed about his manner. As we headed out into the gentrified neighborhood around the Schomburg in search of a late lunch, he walked slowly, his weight on his heels, and took the time to point out local landmarks with the proprietary authority of an alderman.

After settling into a red banquette at a local African-French bistro, Young ordered a pork chop with haricots verts and a sweet fruit mocktail. He told me that he'd started thinking about Bunk before Donald Trump merited a joke at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, let alone a desk in the Oval Office. He traces his interest in hoaxes to a boss he worked for in college who was later implicated in a number of scams. Back then, Young had shoulder-length dreadlocks and a goatee that traversed his upper chin in a narrow strip before unfurling in a rakish inverted plume. He maintained the dreads into his thirties-"It was important to have them and have them be a fact," he said-but by 2001 they'd gotten "heavy on the head" and he lopped them off. (An inveterate collector, he still has them in a box somewhere.)

Young is well aware that everyone from Plato on has accused poets of being purveyors of eloquent deceit-"liars by profession," as David Hume put it. But he insists that the hoax is the enemy of art. "People sometimes say hoaxes are about the blurry line between nonfiction and fiction. I just don't think it's a blurry line at all," he said. Unlike hoaxers, artists promise their audience fair warning: "There's a level of 'Once upon a time' or 'In a galaxy far, far away' that tells you I'm going to be telling you a story." When that pact is broken, art stops and the hoax begins. "It means we've lost fiction," he told me. "We've lost fruitful art."

Coming soon after the election of a president who found his political footing with the help of a racist hoax about his predecessor, Bunk could hardly be more timely. But Young's deeper argument is that we can't escape race when we're talking about hoaxes, because race itself-for all its implacable real-life effects-remains the most consequential hoax in American history. We cite this hoax explicitly every time we use the word Caucasian to mean "white"; the usage comes from a discredited eighteenth-century treatise that traced the palest and most beautiful of the world's five races to the shores of the Black Sea. But we fall for it whenever we forget that at root, as Young writes, race is nothing other than "a fake thing pretending to be real."

The race hoax was helped by a corollary that persisted in polite company even into the latter half of the twentieth century. As recently as 1963, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a future Democratic senator, and Nathan Glazer, a distinguished sociologist, could write in their best-selling Beyond the Melting Pot that "the key to much in the Negro world" was that "the Negro is only an American and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect." The notion of black culture as a nonentity, or at best an imitative agglomeration, is shocking now. But the so-called "myth of the Negro past" was an old and reliable accomplice for the long con of white supremacy. (In 1895, after the death of Frederick Douglass, The New York Times suggested that his exceptional accomplishments ought to be credited to the white race, since it was likely the "white blood" from his father-rumored to be a slave owner-that provided "the superior intelligence he manifested," while his mother's blackness "cost the world a genius.")

With this myth squarely in his sights, Arturo Schomburg, a black historian from Puerto Rico, spent the early part of the twentieth century assembling what he called "vindicating evidences" to show its absurdity. He collected some ten thousand books, pamphlets, and art prints by black authors and artists, and in 1926 sold a substantial portion of that trove to the New York Public Library's Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints in Harlem.

When Young showed me around the Schomburg, the center was nearing the end of a $22 million renovation. As we walked through an exhibition on Black Power, he took equal pride in the Black Panther posters and the center's new video monitors. Like many poets, Young has an associative, allusive habit of mind, a frog-among-the-lily-pads tendency that has not always served his prose well. The New York Times complained that The Grey Album, his previous nonfiction book, was "wordy, hectoring and often glib." But in conversation, his intellectual fluency, along with a talent for extemporaneous speech honed over twenty years of teaching at universities, projects an expansive inclusivity.

In a small room downstairs, Young and a curator unloaded a cart's worth of artifacts from the James Baldwin Papers, whose custody the Schomburg assumed earlier this year. There were telexes in red ink, drafts of Baldwin's essay on Martin Luther King Jr., and signed playbills from his work in the theater. There were also candid, heartbreaking photographs of Baldwin in Paris, where the poet went to live in 1948 with just forty dollars in his pocket.

"To see all the ways that people got their Baldwin I think is really important."

Watching Young handle the Baldwin materials, I could see that for all his enthusiasm about the Schomburg's programming and outreach efforts, it was here, among the yellowing typescripts and handwritten notes tucked in clear plastic sleeves, that he was truly at home. Young often talks about "the dirt and the mud and the gunk" of life as the raw material of his poetry, and his fascination with the idiosyncratic manner by which words elbow a physical path into the world was evident. Baldwin, he noted at one point, "had books that were published in crazy editions. To see all the ways that people got their Baldwin I think is really important."

Compared with Baldwin's early career, which he once described in these pages as a "wild process" of "failure, elimination, and rejection," Young's looks like a golden road of unlimited devotion. And yet just as Baldwin's exile to a cold-water garret in Paris came to seem, in retrospect, representative of the American writer at midcentury, so too does Young's long march through the institutions seem exemplary of our time.

He was born in 1970 to what he describes as "practical people": His father was an opthalmologist and a former Army lieutenant; his mother was one of the first black women to earn a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Nebraska. Both had hefted themselves out of Jim Crow childhoods in rural Louisiana, the first in their families to go to college. His parents' academic training kept the family on the move until he was ten, when they settled down in Topeka, Kansas. The overachieving only child of overachieving parents, Young discovered what he calls the "secret thrill" of poetry when a summer-school teacher mimeographed a poem he wrote and distributed it to the class. He arrived at Harvard determined to write, and his accomplishments-including helping to restart a literary magazine called Diaspora -eventually became fodder for campus folklore. Tracy K. Smith, the current poet laureate of the United States, was a few years behind Young in college. "The legend on campus," she told me, "was that he wrote his thesis in a month." (When I asked Young about this, he laughed and didn't exactly deny it.)

Diaspora's fiction editor was a would-be novelist listed on the masthead as Chipp Whitehead. Better known now as Colson, he is the author of the much-lauded novel The Underground Railroad. Whitehead told me that in contrast with his own published output at Harvard, Young was prolific. "People in college talk a lot about what they're producing in their various pretentious ways. But he was actually already a poet when I met him at nineteen, not a poseur."

During his junior year, Young started hanging around a Victorian house in Cambridge that hosted something called the Dark Room Collective. Founded shortly after Baldwin died in 1987, the collective sponsored a reading series that paired emerging and established writers. The group lasted about a decade, and its effects on American poetry would come to rival those of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Black Mountain School. Two of the Dark Room's alumnae, Smith and Natasha Trethewey, later won Pulitzer prizes, and Trethewey was named poet laureate in 2012, as Smith would be four years later.

Those honors were important-only three black poets won the Pulitzer in the nine decades before Trethewey; in the ten years since, three more have-but the underlying shift they signified was even more consequential. Though poetry still has a race problem, it's at least a generation ahead of Hollywood in addressing it. According to Jordan Davis, a poet and editor, "The incalculably good effect that the Dark Room Collective has had is that it's a much more diverse field now." Davis remembers hearing about the collective in the early nineties. "Poets are mostly vipers," he said, and "to have a group of poets that were so supportive of each other was a great thing to see."

Young insists that "there's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing." But he acknowledges that the visibility of the Dark Room and groups like it spurred broad changes in the field."I don't think black poetry changed," he told me. "Maybe poetry changed and black poets changed poetry."

In college, Young told The Harvard Crimson that "being Harvard's Young Black Poet is really frustrating." Twenty-five years later, he says that it was the Dark Room Collective that freed him from what he once called "the burden of representation." The collective's motto was "Total life is what we want," a phrase borrowed from the anthologist Clarence Major. " 'Total life' means that there isn't anything that you can write that isn't black," Young told me. "Black is huge, poetry is huge, they're huge together."

Not everyone felt that the collective always lived up to that tall order. Carl Phillips has suggested that he was ousted from the group because "I wasn't writing the kind of poems that were correctly 'black.' " But for Young, the freedom he found in the Dark Room made all the difference. In the years since, he has written about the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the rebellion on the slave ship Amistad, and his father, who died in a 2004 hunting accident. In Most Way Home, his first collection, he described:

. . . watching
the eleven o'clock footage of someone beaten
blue by the cops, over & over, knowing you could
do nothing about this, only watch, knowing
it already has all happened without you
& probably will keep on happening, steady
as snake poison traveling toward the heart

Two decades later, in "Oblivion," first published in The New Yorker, he would paint a pastoral scene that takes a sudden ugly turn toward the antebellum:

Cows keep no cry, only
a slave's low moan.
This slight rise
they must climb.

Poems like these might give the impression, not entirely incorrect, that the lived experience of race is Young's central theme. But to spend much time with his work-to spend much time with him, for that matter-is to recognize an organizing obsession that ties together Young's poetry, his prose, the many anthologies he has edited, and his work at the Schomburg. In The Grey Album, he names this impulse precisely. "The willed recovery of what's been lost, often forcibly, I suppose is what keeps me going," he writes. "It is this reason I found myself a poet and a collector and now a curator: to save what we didn't even know needed saving." As he told me, "In African-American culture there's often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has."

"Poetry was not this thing in the atmosphere. You have to look in your backyard. That's the stuff to write about."

When Young came back from Stanford, where he took classes with Denise Levertov, he told Whitehead-by then a close friend-"I'm saving everything, every single document. Denise just retired and is selling her archives." It says something about Young's confidence that at twenty-four he was sure he'd one day have archives worth buying. But his mania for preservation runs far deeper than any conscious calculation, as I learned from his wife, Kate Tuttle. A white editor and book critic originally from Kansas, Tuttle told me, with a laugh, that Young's completist tendencies can be a "vexed" subject at home. (They are awash, she said, in dishware by the midcentury designer Russel Wright.) But she also said that Young had impressed her early on by mentioning that he'd read all fourteen of L. Frank Baum's Oz books, a subject close to her Kansan heart. "When he gets one of something, he wants all of them."

Young claims Lucille Clifton, Seamus Heaney, and Rita Dove as important influences, and says he sees music as the essence of his art. Though his poems do not lack for depth, they rarely scan as difficult, let alone forbidding. He likes puns, and freely borrows forms from other fields (the blues, fugitive-slave posters, film noir). In college, he told me, he realized that "poetry was not this thing in the atmosphere. You have to look in your backyard. That's the stuff to write about." At the time, he'd never read a poem that represented someone like his grandmother. "I remember thinking, If I can get her in a poem, then I'll have done something." Young began to look to poetry as a sort of archive, vindicating evidence of "family-blood, adopted, imagined," to borrow the dedication of Most Way Home. In "Oblivion," he writes what might be his motto, or maybe a fervent dream: "Nothing // stays lost forever."

Young's most severe critics have knocked him for imprecision, and some have suggested that he is too much in thrall to the past. John Palattella, at the time the literary editor of The Nation, wrote in 2005 that Young's "language is often careless" and that his "preoccupation with looking back in reverence has become paralyzing instead of fructifying." Yet nowhere is Young's compulsion to arrest time more moving than in Book of Hours, from 2014, which includes poems he wrote after the death of his father and before the birth of his son. Young says he wanted "even the metaphors to be taken from the experience. I realize now that I was very much trying to document and record in a historic sense." In "Near Miss," he addresses his father:

Old man, Sir-
who, alone, in the room
with your body lying
in state
I saluted-
it is forgetting, not watery
memory, that scares me.

Young's most recent poem in The New Yorker, and his last as long as he is poetry editor, is an ode called "Little Red Corvette" that was published in 2016, a few weeks after Prince's death. Like "Near Miss," it is about loss, albeit in a very different register.

Nothing passed us by. Baby,
you're much too fast. In 1990
we had us an early 80s party-
nostalgic already,
I dug out my best
OPs & two polos, fluorescent,
worn simultaneously-
collar up, pretend preppy.

That The New Yorker would publish something like this-not just a timely elegy but a timely elegy to a rock star, one whose setting is a sweaty college dance party-ought not have surprised anyone who had paid close attention to the sorts of poems the magazine has been publishing since Paul Muldoon took over in 2007. But it is likely news to everyone else-which is to say, roughly, everyone.

After all, for much of the twentieth century, the magazine couldn't escape the rap leveled by Elizabeth Bishop, who complained in 1940 that its editors "want all New Yorker poetry to sound like New Yorker poetry." Muldoon pushed the limit of what was palatable to the magazine's million-plus subscribers, but even under his editorship The New Yorker was never a faithful barometer of the art. (I worked there for several years, but not in the poetry department.) If you wanted a broad but still incomplete overview of the field, you subscribed to Poetry. If you really wanted to know what was happening, you strapped on your shin guards and went scrabbling around in little magazines and on the Internet.

Nevertheless, most poets would walk four miles through flaming snot to appear in The New Yorker's pages. The reason is simple: In a culture that remembers poetry only on its holiest occasions-weddings, funerals, Beyoncé concerts- The New Yorker remains one of the last places where civilians have a chance of running headlong into a previously unpublished stack of verse. Kenneth Koch joked that publishing in the magazine was the only way your psychiatrist would ever see your work.

Jordan Davis sees a natural fit between Young's poetry and the role he's just taken on. "He holds a sort of senatorial authority," Davis told me. "He has really mastered the popular voice and speaking to enormous public concerns. It's a kind of public-speaker role for poetry that has gone unoccupied pretty much since Allen Ginsberg died."

Though the popularity of poetry in previous eras is often overstated, it's nevertheless true that the great cultural "we" did once look to poets like Ginsberg to tell us something essential about ourselves and our world. When I asked David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, why the magazine still publishes poems, he held fast to that ideal. "Poetry is arguably, in some compressed and magical fashion, the highest form of expression, the greatest devotion we have to our most intricate invention, language itself," he wrote in an email. "How can we publish a magazine that proposes to be literary, as well as journalistic, that does not publish poetry?"

Tuttle said that despite her husband's allegiance to history, his tenure at The New Yorker could be "revolutionary" in at least one sense: "It's significant that he's the first black poetry editor there." In 1992, Young told the Crimson, "Even if we were all published in The New Yorker, would that be the point? You're missing the point if it's a new driver driving the same old truck." Now that he has the keys in hand, however, he is careful not to say anything that could be construed as criticism of his predecessors. He wants the work he chooses to "be a public thing," he told me, "to really represent poetry" in all its breadth. In a world crowded with push notifications and tweets threatening nuclear war, poetry's job, he said, "is to take us out of ourselves and bring us back a little bit different. That's a lot to put on any one poem, but I think you can put it on poetry in general."

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Can Kevin Young Make Poetry Matter Again?

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On August 25, 1835, residents of New York City woke to the sound of newsboys howling about an astonishing discovery. According to The New York Sun, a British astronomer had discovered life on the moon. Using a giant telescope outfitted with an ingenious "hydro-oxygen" mechanism, the newspaper said, Sir John Herschel had "affirmatively settled" the question of whether the moon was inhabited.

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There's a way a woman will not relinquish her pocketbook.

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In an Age of Fake News, a Historian of the Hoax

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In an Age of Fake News, a Historian of the Hoax

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Profile

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Kevin Young at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Credit Credit Brad Ogbonna for The New York Times

Kevin Young, the prolific poet, editor, critic and, as of this month, poetry editor of The New Yorker, has, his friends say, a taste for the finer things: He is a reveler in the sensual pleasures of art, food, clothing (this from Natasha Trethewey, the former United States Poet Laureate). He is rarely seen without a pocket square. "We used to have dandy-offs back in the day," the novelist Colson Whitehead recalled. "But I think he surpassed my meager powers. I stopped trying to compete long ago."

As the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, part of the New York Public Library system, Mr. Young oversees a collection of books, manuscripts, papers and ephemera that spans the glories of black arts and letters. There's an unpublished novel and play by James Baldwin; the archive of the jazz saxophone great Sonny Rollins; DVDs of '70s-vintage blaxploitation films that show on screens a few stories above the stage of the American Negro Theater, where Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte once performed.

But Mr. Young, who turns 47 this week, has dedicated the last six years of his life to the intense and sustained study of, politely put, bull. Next week, Mr. Young will publish "Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News," a history, biography and, very nearly, catalogue raisonné of the hoax.

"They tell us a kind of story about ourselves," he said, one that is becoming ever more urgent.

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Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

When Mr. Young began the book, he imagined a "slim meditation on the idea of what a hoax is." But history is rich and well larded with falsehoods, and Mr. Young, already a connoisseur of hoaxes - he described quizzing friends at dinner parties about their favorite hoax, and sharing some of his own (he'd been fascinated by the Spectra poetry hoax, a parody of Modernist poetry taken seriously, for one) - found plenty more that demanded attention. The book, both compendium and commentary, ballooned to nearly 500 pages.

"Bunk" traces a lineage of lies through time. It begins in the 18th century, with Shakespeare forgers and travel liars; makes its way through the 19th, with P. T. Barnum as a kind of ringmaster/hoaxmaster (among whose incredible acts was Joice Heth, a black woman whom he purported had been George Washington's nursemaid - which would have made her, in Barnum's time, 161 years old); and wends through the false memoirs and fake personae of the 20th and 21st. (In Mr. Young's taxonomy the hoax, unlike a lie, a conspiracy theory or an urban legend, flirts with and delights in the possibility of discovery, at least in its early iterations.)

What the hoax returns to, both underpinning and undermining, Mr. Young found, is race. "I had a hunch that they would often deal with race," Mr. Young said, but he was struck how often the hoaxes he found came back to the subject." The hoax lays bare both prejudice (as did Barnum's exhibiting of a black man as "What Is It?," the missing link) and pilfering (as in the case of Rachel Dolezal, the former N.A.A.C.P. chapter president who had been living as a black woman until she was outed, in 2015, as white).

Mr. Young's earlier book, " The Grey Album," looked at the generative power of storytelling, but "Bunk" takes a bleaker view. The progression of the hoax, as Mr. Young describes it, is one from honor to horror. Early hoaxes validated: a young poet tracing a false genealogy between himself and the greats; Joice Heth providing a direct line between her 19th-century spectators and the father of the country. By the late 20th century, the hoax had turned grim: Mr. Young points to hoaxes like false Holocaust or Benghazi memoirs or even, in his view, Dylann Roof, the Charleston, S.C., shooter, whom Mr. Young sees as acting out in the service of a hoax - the hoax that is racism, in Mr. Young's view - that perceives blackness, and black people, as a threat.

In its proximity to violence and its ever-more-accessible transmission via the internet, the hoax has metastasized, the stakes raised ever higher in what Mr. Young calls our "Age of Euphemism," when "fake news" is a rallying cry for any unwelcome report. "In a way, the book is a prehistory to Trump," said David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. "Donald Trump didn't invent -" he used a word he acknowledged would be unpublishable in The Times - "but he has certainly upped the ante."

The more Mr. Young researched, the more dire today's hoaxers and hoaxes seem. The modern hoax's tragic qualities "have overcome whatever triumph the hoax once tried for," Mr. Young said. "We have more, and worse. They're worse in their damage and in their intent now. And to see that, and be proven right, or prescient, is a kind of hollow victory."

The book ends on a raw note: "The half-hoax world seems in no danger of ending - unless it's to give way to the complete-hoax one." But asked if he felt any compulsion to begin Volume II, Mr. Young was succinct: "I don't."

He has, in any case, other responsibilities at the moment. There is the Schomburg, fresh from a two-year, $22.3 million renovation; he arrived there last fall from Atlanta, where he had been a professor and curator at Emory University. (He retains a visiting post at the school.) There is his next poetry collection, "Brown," which arrives in April. And now there is The New Yorker, one of the rare mainstream publications that still publishes poetry, where he will be tasked with selecting and editing the poems that appear each week.

The poetry world can be insular, Balkanized and obscure - name three star poets - and The New Yorker is one of the largest conduits between its various inlets and a wider world than most of the poetry journals can hope to attract. "People who are not habitual poetry readers happening to read things that are magical is one of the great happy accidents that can occur reading The New Yorker," said Mr. Remnick. "Kevin will be a master of those happy accidents."

As it happens, The New Yorker had some hand in Mr. Young's development as a poet. As a young teenager in Topeka, Kan., where he spent part of his youth, Mr. Young discovered the yellow-covered paperback "The New Yorker Book of Poems."

"I carried that thing around with me," he said. "I recently found my edition - it has little checks next to poems I liked." (One of them, James Dickey's " Falling," introduced Mr. Young to the idea that his own state could have a place in poetry.)

Mr. Young wrote poems of his own from the age of 13, through high school and Harvard, where friends remembered him as an ambitious and driven writer, collecting prizes, the Stegner Fellowship and praise. He published his first book, "Most Way Home," after it was selected by Lucille Clifton for the National Poetry Series. (He would later edit her collected poems.)

"He always knew what he wanted to do," said Mr. Whitehead, a friend since college. "When most people were dabbling, he was working. He was well on his way when most of us were listening to Nirvana and wearing dirty clothes."

Mr. Remnick praised Mr. Young's "catholic with a small c" taste, something he said he shared with the magazine's outgoing poetry editor, Paul Muldoon. And Mr. Young, whose first poem in the magazine, "Langston Hughes," was published in 1999, said he would work to spotlight the wide breadth of American poetry, from its establishment lions to emerging voices. (Of recent note, he said, were Tiana Clark and Kaveh Akbar, both published in the magazine by Mr. Muldoon.)

"It's an exciting moment, in black poetry and poetry in general," he said."I'm really looking forward to that being in the pages."

O.K., but what kind of poems speak to you?

"I mean, good ones," Mr. Young said, and chuckled. "I think I go with the Duke Ellington view on music. He said, 'There's two kinds of music - there's good music, and then there's the other kind.'"

Mr. Young is held to be a champion of the good kind.

"I can't think of a better person to be the curator of what poetry people should be reading than Kevin," said Ms. Trethewey, who first met him 20-some years ago as fellow members of the Dark Room Collective, a community of black poets. "I call him 'The Kevin Young.' I started calling him that when we first met. He's certainly grown into it."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C25 of the New York edition with the headline: In an Age of Fake News, a Historian of the Hoax. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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In an Age of Fake News, a Historian of the Hoax

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Profile Kevin Young, the prolific poet, editor, critic and, as of this month, poetry editor of The New Yorker, has, his friends say, a taste for the finer things: He is a reveler in the sensual pleasures of art, food, clothing (this from Natasha Trethewey, the former United States Poet Laureate).

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12 Leaders Who Are Shaping the Next Generation of Artists

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12 Leaders Who Are Shaping the Next Generation of Artists

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When we consume art-get swept up in a film, meander through a museum, parse the lines of a poem-we tend to direct our praise or criticism toward the artist who created the work. But behind every artist, there is almost always a person, and sometimes many more than one, who believed in their vision and gave them an opportunity to share their work with the world.

It may be a gallerist who took a chance on a painter whose work they knew would upend the norms of the art world and prove a tough sell to buyers. It may be a publisher who releases into the world books with the power to reframe how we think about our common history, or an editor who breathes new life into the work of a German playwright by having it translated for the first time for English-speaking readers. It may be an executive who deems a television series undeniably binge-worthy.

The art that reaches our eyes and ears does not find its way there by accident. Here, TIME highlights the work of 12 champions of culture who are creating platforms-be they museum walls or magazine pages or literal stages-for the artists who are opening our minds and changing our world today.

Jack Shainman

Founder and Owner of Jack Shainman Gallery

Even as a kid growing up in Williamstown, Mass., Jack Shainman was honing his eye for great art. The son of a music professor, he was a regular at nearby museums like the Clark Art Institute, and he cut his teeth on collecting by buying work from local art students. Now, 30 years into his career as a gallery owner, Shainman is responsible for helping to cultivate some of the most significant names in contemporary art today, from painter Kerry James Marshall to photographer and multimedia artist Carrie Mae Weems to Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui. Through the decades, one thing has remained constant: his passion for finding an audience for underseen visionaries.

To be a good gallery owner, Shainman says, you have to be fully committed to the artists you represent. "When you show something in the gallery, you have to be ready to defend it-not everybody comes in and loves everything all the time." This was certainly the case when he opened his first New York City gallery with his late partner Claude Simard, in 1986. Shainman held fast to representing creators whose work he truly believed was worthy, rather than catering to the tastes of the industry. But it wasn't exactly a recipe for quick success. Several of the artists Shainman represented were people of color, and thanks to the underlying currents of racism in the art world-a problem that's far from solved today-he struggled to get his roster of artists included in major art fairs and often met with reluctant clients. After Marshall's first show with Shainman in 1993 wrapped up with a few unsold paintings, Shainman remembers the painter telling him, "I just don't think people are ready to have pictures of black people in their living rooms."

Things have changed since then-last year, a painting of Marshall's sold for $21.1 million to the mogul Sean Combs-but for Shainman, who now has two galleries in New York and a 30,000-sq.-ft. exhibition space upstate, his motivation remains the same. While he's proud that his gallery is known for its diverse roster of artists, he says that's simply a by-product of his approach. "It happened organically," he says, "just by being open to new things and for the love of the work."

Chris Jackson

Publisher and editor in chief of One World, a Penguin Random House imprint

Chris Jackson publishes books. But what moves him most can't be found within their pages. More than anything, the publisher and editor in chief of the imprint One World is moved when he sees the work his books do to bring people together.

Take civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson's 2014 book Just Mercy, which Jackson edited. Last year, during the inaugural weekend of the national lynching memorial Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative built, Jackson saw visitors carrying Just Mercy as a kind of guiding text. "The book was the platform Bryan used to extend his work in ways that are transforming our communal memory in this country," Jackson says.

Jackson has pursued these kinds of stories for years, during his decade as executive editor at Spiegel & Grau and now as head of One World, which he took over in 2017. One World was founded to highlight African-American stories in the 1990s when the publishing world was trying to diversify its ranks. But the imprint was siloed and struggled to maintain the broader industry's interest, Jackson says. Since taking the helm, he has sought to institutionalize a pipeline for new voices that are upending traditional narratives.

But his goal is not to acquire any book by a writer from a marginalized background for diversity's sake alone. "The idea that the imprint is committed to diversity is kind of absurd," Jackson says. "We want to reflect the world we live in." The imprint allows writers to tell subversive stories in an authentic way, without what he calls "white filtering," or couching stories in ways that feel comfortable or familiar to white readers.

Jackson grew up seeing poverty and violence in Harlem but also witnessing privilege at Hunter College High School and then Columbia University-experiences that left him searching for his place and often finding answers in books. "The story of survival but also the story of trying to find a better way is the burden of everyone who grows up black in America," Jackson says. "You think a lot about: How do we survive? How do we learn how to take care of each other better? How do we imagine a better future? And I think that's something I'm able to bring to every kind of project."

While it's an editor's job to obsess over the beauty and precision of language-and Jackson says he does this too-he wants more from his books than their aesthetic value. And it's paying off: Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me won the National Book Award; Eddie Huang's Fresh Off the Boat is now an ABC sitcom; Just Mercy is set to become a feature film in 2020. "In this moment when a lot of people are feeling despair," he says, "I get to participate in imagining what can be."

Lisa Nishimura

Vice president of original documentary and comedy programming at Netflix

Back when Netflix was a DVD-mailing service-before streaming changed everything-Lisa Nishimura was in charge of buying movies from all over the world for the company. She knew that the stories she found, from Bollywood romances to obscure anime titles, might never have reached U.S. audiences had she not brought them in. More than a decade later, Nishimura's role has expanded. Today she ushers to the screen various forms of nonfiction storytelling and comedy specials, and she brings the same zeal she once applied to hunting down the rarest gems-only now, tailored to the era of binge-watching.

If you've consumed whole a buzzy Netflix series, there's a good chance Nishimura was behind it: the true-crime sensation Making a Murderer and the bizarre cult saga Wild Wild Country both owe thanks to her commitment to championing under-the-radar filmmakers. She argued that people would binge nonfiction in the same way they would dramas like Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards. And she was right. Making a Murderer, which came as part of a wave of true-crime stories sweeping America in 2015, drew so many viewers that it renewed public interest in overturning the convictions of its subjects.

Nishimura also helped secure Dave Chappelle's splashy 2017 return to the screen after a 13-year hiatus, and she gave comedians Hannah Gadsby and Ali Wong their biggest stages. "I'm drawn to filmmakers and comedians that have an incredibly clear and personal point of view-it's just bubbling over," she says. Documentaries and comedies, for all their differences, both allow audiences to have an "immersion in another person's experience, almost firsthand." When their work is treated with care, viewers of all kinds feel better understood, she says.

And now, as Netflix grows with breakneck speed, Nishimura is considering how everything she brings to the platform will land with its growing global audience. "I'm programming for the world," she says.

Rhea Combs

Curator of film and photography at the National Museum of African American History and Culture

Among the many artifacts collected at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is a recently discovered photograph of Harriet Tubman. The photo, which shows Tubman sitting against a stark white background, captures the famed abolitionist in her mid-40s in the years following the Civil War. An unusual look at Tubman in her younger years, the photo offers a new perspective on the rarely photographed freedom fighter. It's also exactly the type of object Rhea Combs looks for when she puts together exhibitions.

"In most images of Harriet Tubman, she's in her 80s, 90s. She's feeble-looking," Combs says. Finding the photo of a younger Tubman made her full humanity clearer. Looking at this new artifact, she says, "I can understand how this woman could get people to move and fight for their own freedom."

As a curator at the museum, tickets to which consistently sell out, Combs searches for quotidian items that might stretch museumgoers' common understanding of history. After years in academia studying film, visual culture, race and gender, she was compelled to bring her research out of the ivory tower and into the public. The images and films that make up Combs' research help her to identify visual through lines in history, as with an exhibition on photography in hip-hop in which she paired images of contemporary artists, like Queen Latifah, that mirrored artists from the past, like the Harlem Renaissance entertainer Gladys Bentley.

Combs seeks to show history on a continuum. She put together the museum's inaugural film festival in 2018, where she screened a number of iconic African-American films dealing with themes of power and place, among other subjects. In particular, she seeks out work from filmmakers whose work has long gone ignored, or from contemporary independent artists who have not had their films distributed in theaters.

Another of Combs' prized photographs depicts the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who helped organize Mississippi's Freedom Summer, smiling with her husband. Most people who know of Hamer picture her at work. But there is value in the in-between, says Combs. "It's within those everyday moments that we better understand who those people were, and how we can become agents within history making as well."

Nikesh Shukla

Writer, editor of The Good Immigrant

When Nikesh Shukla was shopping around his first novel, a white agent told the British-Indian author his characters were not "authentically Asian enough." Another declined because they had plans to work with another Indian writer. "I was like, 'We can write about different stuff,'" he recalls. His novel, Coconut Unlimited, was eventually published, but he knew he wasn't alone in this struggle. He often thought about his uncle, the first person in the U.K. to bring a racial discrimination case to court after being rejected while trying to buy a house. "He stood up for what was right," Shukla says. "I wanted to stand up for people that I didn't feel like had a voice."

Now, he wants people of color to write the stories they've always wanted to tell. In the collection The Good Immigrant, he compiled 15 essays from minority writers that explore the impacts of being othered in the country you call home. But, he says, "Not all writers of color want to write about race. They want to write sci-fi or creative nonfiction about beekeeping." So Shukla launched The Good Journal, a magazine that invites minority writers to share stories beyond the scope of race or immigration. The journal includes personal essays from crime writers and works from emerging poets.

Moving forward, Shukla is eager to include more contributors whose experiences reflect other identities that intersect with race, like class, disability and sexual orientation. An American version of The Good Immigrant, featuring essays from 26 first and second-generation immigrants in the U.S., will be released on Feb. 19.

Shukla, too, wants to focus on the subjects that interest him. His most recent book, Run, Riot, dealt with weighty themes centering on gentrification and police brutality. His next subjects-love and joy-might not seem radical. But to him, they are. "The revolutionary, joyful act is writing about brown people in love," he says. "We never get to see that."

Jason Moran and Q-Tip

Artistic director of jazz and artistic director of hip-hop at the Kennedy Center

In the four years since Jason Moran became the artistic director of jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, he's built a skate park on its steps, paired stand-up comedy with abstract jazz performances and facilitated live painting at concerts. In short, he's shown one of the nation's most prominent cultural institutions what a living, breathing American art form can look like in real time.

"Part of my role as a curator is to make sure the sensibilities are diverse enough, that we aren't just presenting one thing," says the pianist and composer, a 2010 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship "genius" grant. "It's about informing the institution that there have been major gaps, things that you could frankly say they have ignored in the past."

Moran's push to recognize diverse voices in jazz is paralleled by the efforts of Q-Tip, A Tribe Called Quest's philosophical MC and producer, who was named the center's inaugural artistic director of hip-hop culture in 2016.

The rapper, a champion of socially conscious hip-hop, regards his role as not only a curator but also a historian. "We take a view of the landscape in not only hip-hop culture, but what's happening socially and nationally," he says. His innovations so far include the formation of a Hip Hop Culture Council, which helps to create projects that celebrate the past, present and future of the art form. The Council relies on the insights of industry notables like Questlove, the drummer and bandleader of The Roots, and hip-hop founding father Fab 5 Freddy.

But he's most excited about an award, still in the works, that will be bestowed upon hip-hop artists, akin to the center's prestigious annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The honor feels especially poignant considering that for a long time, the genre was not recognized as an elevated art form-a perception that's now shifting, in part thanks to Q-Tip's efforts. "It's all about a consistency and dedication to the culture," he says. "Through those things, there's a truth in what you do."

Damian Woetzel

President of the Juilliard School

Damian Woetzel is overflowing with ideas for ways Juilliard's students can engage with the world around them. The former New York City Ballet principal dancer, who spent 23 years with the company before retiring in 2008, has made outreach and collaboration hallmarks of his leadership since taking over the prestigious school in July 2018.

"There's a higher level of excellence that comes when you invest in a creative and dynamic collaborative spirit," Woetzel tells TIME. "It's how we get our ideas. They can't live in a vacuum."

For more than 100 years, Juilliard has trained performing artists who lead their fields around the world. Alumni include the likes of Jessica Chastain and Viola Davis, Itzhak Perlman and Renée Fleming, to name just a few. This is not a responsibility Woetzel takes lightly. The tall ambitions of its students is part of why he believes so deeply in collaboration: to be the best, artists need a broad range of knowledge, he says.

One way he has pursued his goal of collaboration is through the Creative Associates program, which brings established artists in a variety of fields to Juilliard to teach and work with students throughout the year. This year, the group has included the Late Show with Stephen Colbert bandleader Jon Batiste, hip-hop dancer Lil Buck, tap dancer and choreographer Michelle Dorrance, clown Bill Irwin and composer Caroline Shaw, the youngest recipient ever of the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Juilliard has a long tradition of viewing the artist as citizen. The idea, Woetzel says, is to create artists who use their art to impact their communities. Instrumental to this goal is the assurance that the artists Juilliard sends back out into their communities come from a wide range of communities themselves. This summer, Juilliard will host a program for underrepresented string players with the Sphinx Organization, a Detroit nonprofit. As they're trying to improve the world through art, Woetzel wants his students to remember: "Artistic ability is far greater than opportunity, and that is something we all need to work at."

Erin Christovale

Assistant curator at the Hammer Museum

Less than a decade into her career, Erin Christovale is a regular on "young curators to watch" lists. She has been recognized within the art world for her annual film program and a 2016 show at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery about citizenship and democracy, among other work. But despite all the buzz, Christovale is focused on a central mission: engaging people who have never set foot in a museum before. And so far, they're showing up.

Christovale traces her curatorial approach to her time as a film student at the University of Southern California. She remembers one particular discussion about how the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation helped foment a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. "Film is the most widely distributed form of visual media, and it has the capacity to shift society's thinking and be a political tool," she says." So after graduating, she began organizing film programming and exhibits, highlighting work by emerging queer artists and artists of color, before being named an assistant curator at UCLA's Hammer Museum.

She co-founded Black Radical Imagination in 2013 with her collaborator, Amir George. The program includes conventional cinema alongside avant-garde video art made by black artists. From the beginning, it was important to Christovale and George that the more experimental work not feel intimidating to their audience. "We always have a talk back, and try and bring the filmmakers into the conversation, because we understand that the audience we are bringing in may not be used to viewing experimental work."

At the Hammer Museum, Christovale's prioritization of the accessibility of art has remained intact. "The goal of my shows are to be sites of conversation, where people are thinking about these art objects as agents of change," she says. "A public museum is supposed to be a civic space."

Last summer, Christovale co-curated the Hammer's "Made in L.A." exhibition, which included more than 30 diverse artists from the city. One work, by EJ Hill, had a particular impact. As part of his installation, Hill stood on a podium every day with no breaks. As a queer, black man, his presence was a physical declaration of resilience. While performance art can often alienate, Hill's piece resonated. "People would burst into tears. People would bring him fruit and flowers and sing to him," Christovale recalls. "It's so simple. When you offer space in which people can see themselves reflected in the work, then they will come."

Bird Runningwater

Director of the Native Program at Sundance

It takes about 30 minutes to drive from the Mescalero Apache Reservation in rural New Mexico to the closest movie theater. In the 1970s, Bird Runningwater and his father relished their trips there to see popular films like Rocky.

But it wasn't long before he realized his heritage wasn't represented onscreen, and he stopped going to the movies. "I'll go do other things because I know I'm not going to see people like me on the screen," Runningwater recalls thinking as a child. Decades later, that disappointed child has grown up to become part of the solution. As director of the Native Program at the Sundance Institute, he supports and solicits indigenous filmmakers to present their work at the Sundance Film Festival and beyond.

Under Runningwater's guidance, the Native Program works with indigenous filmmakers around the world through labs and forums. Previous participants include the Oscar-nominated director Taika Waititi, a Native New Zealander who went on to direct Marvel's Thor: Ragnarok in 2017. Waititi's 2010 dramedy, Boy, is one of Runningwater's favorite projects to debut at Sundance-and the highest-grossing film ever in New Zealand until another of Waititi's movies, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, overtook it six years later. Another alumnus of the program, Sterlin Harjo, directed the 2007 feature Four Sheets to the Wind, which was nominated for the grand jury prize at Sundance.

Runningwater's childhood gripe still holds true. "Native Americans are invisible in American culture," he says. According to UCLA's Hollywood Diversity Report, Native Americans made up only 0.5 percent of film roles in 2016's 200 top theatrical releases. "Because we have a visibility issue, we have to establish the narrative." To him, that means owning the storytelling process rather than seeing stories told from the outside. It's not that Native American stories have never been told in film. But many of those movies either feature stereotypes of indigenous people or are told from the perspectives of white filmmakers or characters, if not both.

Change in Hollywood is slow. But Runningwater hopes that when the next generation on his reservation travels to the theater, they'll see someone they identify with onscreen.

Rujeko Hockley

Assistant curator at the Whitney Museum

In the spring of 2017, the Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art became a site of controversy when a painting by a white artist, Dana Schutz, depicting the mutilated body of Emmett Till sparked protests about institutional racism in the art world. Just two months after the Biennial ended, Rujeko Hockley, who had just taken a role at the storied museum of American art, co-curated her first exhibition there, "An Incomplete History of Protest." Rather than shy away from the still smoldering controversy, Hockley and her colleagues made a bold choice: including the Whitney's own history as a place of protest in the exhibit, with documents and letters from the museum's archives.

To Hockley, we can't fully engage with art without understanding the circumstances under which it was created. "I don't want to talk about the rise of minimalism in the 1960s without also talking about the lead-up to the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement," she says. Throughout her career, Hockley has assembled politically potent exhibits. Her 2017 Brooklyn Museum show, "We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-85," showcased art made by black women during the rise of the second-wave feminist movement. Her goal is to show people that art history and history  history are one and the same. She urges museumgoers to consider not just the artwork but also the artists' experiences. "Artists don't live in a vacuum, and they don't make in a vacuum," she says. "So it doesn't make sense to have an art history that doesn't take into account world-changing events."

Next up, Hockley will co-curate the Whitney's 2019 Biennial. The 2017 protests might make someone in her position nervous. But she sees them as confirmation of the value of museums. "People really do care about museums and look to the arts for guidance," she says. And while curators must be responsible for what they put out in the world, Hockley says, "It doesn't mean we have to be gun-shy. Just more thoughtful."

Kevin Young

Director of the Schomburg Center and poetry editor of the New Yorker

In 1925, two New York City institutions were founded: the New Yorker and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Nearly a century later, poet Kevin Young holds leading posts at both. His aim: to make people care about words and the history behind them.

This might sound daunting in the America of 2019, as urgent news breaks hourly and dire headlines announce the decline of libraries and attention spans alike. But for Young, those realities make this a perfect time to appreciate poetry and art. Both his jobs allow him to dig through the past to understand the present. "I'm not an archivist by training," he says. "But by temperament, I love thinking about history and how it talks to now."

At the New Yorker, Young sees hundreds of submissions from contemporary poets each week, but he also has access to the magazine's long institutional memory. Within this playground, he has created projects like a series of multimedia poem-letters written throughout 2017 between National Book Award finalist Ada Limon and MacArthur "genius" grant winner Natalie Diaz. He also recently published a previously untranslated poem by Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright who died in 1956. Young has found new meaning in historic texts at the Schomburg, too. There, he acquired the never-before-seen manuscript of Malcolm X's biography and a "lost" unpublished chapter and displayed them in the museum's lobby.

Young's love for the past is in part inspired by his family history, which goes back hundreds of years in Louisiana. When he visited as a child, he felt connected to the generations of family rooted there. "It makes you want to know about the past but also sometimes to escape it. That combination really drives me," he says. "Thinking about how we can know more about the past and also fighting that impulse to say we're past it is really important."

Young reckons with these questions in his own work: 10 collections of poetry, eight poetry collections he's edited and two nonfiction books. But he sees other contemporary black artists grappling with them too. "I see us as [being] in this new renaissance," he says. Young cites fellow creators like Barry Jenkins, whose film Moonlight won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017; Colson Whitehead, whose novel The Underground Railroad was a New York Times best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize; and Tracy K. Smith, the U.S. poet laureate. These artists are "thinking about our shared humanity but also talking about American history and its questions and challenges," he explains.

"To me, poetry has long been alive. It's continuing to live and it's also thriving right now," Young says. "I'm interested in capturing that aliveness."
Portrait illustration by Alexandra Compain-Tissier for TIME See the 2019 Optimists issue, guest-edited by Ava DuVernay. Correction, Feb. 7 The original version of this story misstated Q-Tip's involvement in a concert during which the rapper Nas performed alongside the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. Q-Tip was not involved in the event.
Write to Abigail Abrams at abigail.abrams@time.com, Wilder Davies at wilder.davies@time.com, Mahita Gajanan at mahita.gajanan@time.com, Rachel E. Greenspan at rachel.greenspan@time.com and Cady Lang at cady.lang@timemagazine.com.

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12 Leaders Who Are Shaping the Next Generation of Artists

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When we consume art-get swept up in a film, meander through a museum, parse the lines of a poem-we tend to direct our praise or criticism toward the artist who created the work. But behind every artist, there is almost always a person, and sometimes many more than one, who believed in their vision and gave them an opportunity to share their work with the world.

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Black America - From Poetry to Art

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Black America - From Poetry to Art with Kevin Young

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Poet Kevin Young was born on November 8, 1970 in Lincoln, Nebraska. He attended Harvard University and studied with renowned writers Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido during his college career. He then received his Masters of Fine Arts from Brown University. Stanford University also awarded Young with the Stegner Fellowship. Some of Young’s famous poetry collections include Brown (2018), Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015 (2016), Book of Hours (2014), Dear Darkness: Poems (2008) among others. The Academy of American Poets awarded Young with the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his poetry collection Book of Hours in 2015 while also being a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Young’s poetry collection Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003) was also a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Kevin Young “served as the Curator of the  Raymond Danowski Poetry Library” at Emory University in Atlanta. (Kevin Young Poetry) He has also taught poetry as well as writing at many universities such as University of Georgia, Emory University and Indiana University. While at Emory University, he received the award of University Distinguished Professor. In addition to being a poet, Young is also an essayist, editor and professor. He is also the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Young’s famous only non fiction book entitled Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarist, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News was in consideration for the National Book Award. In 2016, Young was also inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Currently, Young resides in New Jersey as he is the poetry editor for the New Yorker magazine. Young also leads the New Yorker Poetry Podcast which features guests speakers and discussions on poetry and other readings.