This Research Guide was created for a specific event on a set date or time. It will not be continually updated. After four years Kelvin Smith Library archives all event specific Research Guides.
The Kelvin Smith Library provides the campus community with access to world-class research collections, technology-equipped classrooms and meeting spaces, state-of-the-art digital resources and even a café. In support of the Cleveland Humanities Festival the library offers a selection of resources accessible in this series of Research Guides.
This guide was prepared for the presentation by Kevin Young on March 30, 2020 entitled "Truth be Told: How to Spot Bunk and Stay Sane in an Age of Euphemism."
Kevin Young is a poet, essayist, editor, curator, and University Distinguished Professor at Emory University. He is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research division of the New York Public Library devoted to “the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences.” Young serves as poetry editor for The New Yorker, and has published several essays with the magazine as well. Young has also published essays and poetry in The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and Callaloo, amongst others.
His book Bunk: the Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (2017, Graywolf Press) won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction and was longlisted for the National Book Award amongst a host of other honors. The New York Times Book Review praised Young’s work for its “scrupulous feel for archival traces ― for the urgent materiality of memory…” Young has published eleven books of poetry, including Blue Laws, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. He is editor of the forthcoming anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, appearing in September 2020 for Library of America.
Revised and updated 07/12/2021.
