While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group the Dark Room Collective.[4] He is heavily influenced by the poets Langston Hughes, John Berryman, and Emily Dickinson and by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Young wrote much of his debut collection, Most Way Home, while still an undergraduate.[9] Published by William Morrow in 1995,[7] Most Way Home was selected by Lucille Clifton for the National Poetry Series and won Ploughshares' John C. Zacharis First Book Award.[8] Writing in Ploughshares, Rob Arnold observes that in that first book Young "explores his own family's narratives, showing an uncanny awareness of voice and persona."[9]
Young has described his next three books – To Repel Ghosts (named for a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting), Jelly Roll (a collection of love poems named for Jelly Roll Morton), and Black Maria – as an "American trilogy", calling the series Devil's Music.[9]
Young's collection The Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014)[10] won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
Young is also the author of For The Confederate Dead, Dear Darkness, Blues Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems 1995–2015 (2016)[11] and editor of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000), Blues Poems (2003), Jazz Poems (2006), and John Berryman's Selected Poems (2004).[9]
His poem "Black Cat Blues," originally published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, was included in The Best American Poetry 2005. Young's poetry has also appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other literary magazines. In 2007, he served as guest editor for an issue of Ploughshares.[9] He has written on art and artists for museums in Los Angeles and Minneapolis.
His 2003 book of poems Jelly Roll was a finalist for the National Book Award. Young was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 2003, as well as an NEA Literature Fellow in Poetry.[12]
After stints at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, Young taught writing at Emory University, where he was the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, as well as the curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a large collection of first and rare editions of poetry in English.[13][14]
In September 2016,[3] Young became the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.[15]
In March 2017, he was named poetry editor of The New Yorker,[4] to begin in November 2017.[3]
Young is working on two books: a non-fiction book called Bunk on the U.S. history of lies and hoaxes, and a poetry collection that he has described as being "about African American history and also personal history, growing up in Kansas, which has a long black history including Langston Hughes and others."[3]
In September 2020, he was named director of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, to begin in January 2021.[2] Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Society of American Historians,Young was also named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.[16]
