Kevin Young Will Lead The New Yorker's Poetry Section
Yesterday, The New Yorker announced that this fall the magazine's poetry editor, Paul Muldoon, will pass the torch to poet Kevin Young, who currently serves as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Muldoon has served as the section's editor for the past ten years. Of interest to readers of these pages: both Young and Muldoon studied with Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. Sopran Deb of the New York Times writes:
Mr. Young is an esteemed poet and scholar whose work has been published in The New Yorker dating back to 1999. His most recent work, “Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015,” made the 2016 National Book Award longlist.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Mr. Muldoon, 65, who was raised in Ireland, had his first poem published when he was 16 and his first short collection at 19. In 1996, he was awarded an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature. In 2007, he replaced Alice Quinn at The New Yorker as the poetry editor, a post that she held for 20 years.
In 2013, Mr. Muldoon started a poetry podcast, saying that the “eye is not the only buyer into, and beneficiary of, the poem.” He was also well known for his interviews at the New Yorker Festival, including with Patti Smith in 2012 and Paul Simon in 2013.