Kevin Young (poet)

Early life

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young was the only child of two working parents, his father, Dr. Paul E. Young, an ophthalmologist and his mother, Dr. Azzie Young, a chemist. Due to the careers of both of his parents, his family moved frequently throughout his youth. Young lived in six different places before he reached the age of ten, but his family ultimately 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.

Young attended Harvard College, where he studied with Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido and became friends with writer Colson Whitehead. He graduated in 1992, then held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University (1992–94), where he worked with Denise Levertov, and received his Master of Fine Arts from Brown University, where Michael S. Harper served as a significant influence.

Career

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.

Young wrote much of his debut collection, Most Way Home, while still an undergraduate. Published by William Morrow in 1995, Most Way Home was selected Lucille Clifton for the National Poetry Series and won Ploughshares's John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Writing in Ploughshares, Rob Arnold described the "explor[ing Young's] own family's narratives, showing an uncanny awareness of voice and persona."

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.

Young's collection The Book of Hours (Knopf 2014) 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) 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).

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.

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.

In September 2016, Young became the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.

In March 2017, he was named poetry editor of The New Yorker, to begin in November 2017.

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 he's 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."

Personal life

Young lives in New York. He is married to Kate Tuttle, book columnist at The Boston Globe; Tuttle and Young married in 2005.

Awards