Kevin Young wins Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize

March 30, 2010—The Grey Album: Music, Lying, & the Blackness of Being by Kevin Young has been chosen as the newest winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Young will receive a $12,000 advance, and Graywolf will publish the collection of essays in Spring 2012.

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is designed to honor and encourage the art of literary nonfiction, and is given to an outstanding manuscript by an emerging author who has published no more than two previous books of nonfiction. Last year’s winner, Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays by Eula Biss, was recently awarded the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award.

Robert Polito, esteemed author and Director of the Graduate Writing Program at the New School in New York, served as the outside judge for the contest. “This is a narrative of surprises—a book of secrets, too, though many of those secrets, as we discover, are cunningly hidden in plain sight (or in plain speech),” said Polito. “The Grey Album investigates, even as it also performs, an American covert history—the stories behind any official or familiar story—as well as some emblematic escapes from and into American history. Veering across many vernaculars, from literature into music, theory into autobiography, Kevin Young writes cultural criticism of the most audacious, skillful, and ultimately touching sort.”

Kevin Young, who was a National Book Award finalist for his poetry collection Jelly Roll, was thrilled to win the Prize. “Words can’t describe how elated I was upon hearing that I had won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for The Grey Album, the mash-up of music, literature, and lying I have been working on for more years than I care to admit. I’m all the more excited to appear on such a distinguished list, and hope to do the prize—and my subject—justice.”
Previous winners of the prize include Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays by Eula Biss, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan by Terese Svoboda, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments by Ander Monson, and Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles by Kate Braverman. Graywolf’s editors and Polito will consider submissions for the next Nonfiction Prize in June 2011.

Graywolf Press director and publisher Fiona McCrae said, “Of all the short-listed manuscripts, Kevin Young’s The Grey Album stood out for its depth and scope. It’s truly grappling with some pressing American cultural and racial themes and doing so with great originality and gusto.”

About Kevin Young
Kevin Young is the author of six books of poetry, including Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008), winner of the Southern Independent Bookseller’s Award in poetry, and Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. Young’s anthology The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing appeared in March 2010 from Bloomsbury. Recently named the United States Artists James Baldwin Fellow, Young is Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. Learn more online at www.kevinyoungpoetry.com.

About Robert Polito
Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, and critic. His most recent books are the poetry collection Hollywood & God, and The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber. Other books include Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography; Doubles; and A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover. The recipient of Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim fellowships, Robert Polito is the Director of the Graduate Writing Program at the New School in New York.

About Graywolf Press
Graywolf Press is an independent, not-for-profit publisher dedicated to the creation and promotion of thoughtful and imaginative contemporary literature essential to a vital and diverse culture. Graywolf has published significant books of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and translations for over thirty-five years, and has become one of the leading literary publishers in the country.

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is funded in part by endowed gifts from the Arsham Ohanessian Charitable Remainder Unitrust and the Ruth Easton Fund of the Edelstein Family Foundation.

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Kevin Young wins Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize