Kevin Young (poet)

For other people with the same name, see Kevin Young (disambiguation).
Kevin Young
Born (1970-11-08) November 8, 1970
Lincoln, Nebraska
Alma mater Harvard College;
Stanford University;
Brown University
Genre Poetry

Kevin Young (born November 8, 1970) is an American poet and teacher of poetry. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University (1992–94), and received his Master of Fine Arts from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group the Dark Room Collective. He is heavily influenced by the poets Langston Hughes, John Berryman, and Emily Dickinson and by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Early life

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young was the only child of two working parents, his father an ophthalmologist and his mother a chemist. Due to the careers of both of his parents, his family moved frequently throughout his youth. Kevin Young lived in six different places before he reached the age of ten, but his family finally settled in Topeka, Kansas. He first began to pursue writing when he was thirteen years old, after he attended a summer writing class at Washburn University.[1]

Career

Young is the author of Most Way Home, To Repel Ghosts, Jelly Roll, Black Maria, For The Confederate Dead, Dear Darkness, and editor of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, Blues Poems, Jazz Poems, and John Berryman's Selected Poems.

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. 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.[2]

After stints at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, Young now teaches writing at Emory University, where he is 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.[3][4]

Beginning in the "late fall" of 2016, Young will serve as the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.[5]

Awards

Bibliography

Collections

Editor
Anthologies

References

  1. ↑ Gioia, Dana (2004). Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Boston: McGraw-Hill. pp. 1041–1042. ISBN 0-07-240019-6.
  2. ↑ "University Honors & Awards: Honoree - Kevin Young", Indiana University.
  3. ↑ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/kevin-young
  4. ↑ http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/kevin-young
  5. ↑ Kelly, William P. (August 1, 2016). "Introducing the New Director of the Schomburg Center, Kevin Young". NYPL blog. Retrieved August 1, 2016.
  6. ↑ Carolyn Kellogg (August 14, 2013). "Jacket Copy: PEN announces winners of its 2013 awards". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved August 14, 2013.
  7. ↑ United States Artists Official Website
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