Creative Writing Program

Faculty

Kevin Young

Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing

Curator, Literary Collections and Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, MARBL (Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library)

876 Woodruff Library
Creative Writing Program
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322

404-712-9089 (Callaway Office)
404-712-2239 (Woodruff Library Office)
404-727-4672 (Fax)
kevin.young@emory.edu

Spring 2012 office hours:

By appointment

Kevin Young is the author of seven collections of poetry and editor of six others, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (2011) and Jelly Roll (2003), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. He most recently edited Best American Poetry 2011, out in September. His book The Grey Album: Music, Shadows, Lies won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and is forthcoming in spring 2012.

Young’s anthology The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing appeared in March 2010 from Bloomsbury and was a poetry besteller. His previous book of poems, Dear Darkness (2008) won the Southern Independent Bookseller's Award in poetry; it was also featured on National Public Radio and in The New Yorker as one of the best books of that year. Young’s fifth collection, For the Confederate Dead, won the 2007 Quill Award in Poetry and has been featured in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly and on NPR.

Young's first book, Most Way Home, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Lucille Clifton, and later won the Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares. His second book, To Repel Ghosts, a "double album" based on the work of the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, was a finalist for the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets and appeared in a "remix" version in 2005. Young's fourth collection, Black Maria, a film noir in verse, was also staged in a dramatic version by the Providence Black Repertory Theater.

Young's poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, and many other journals and anthologies. He is editor of the anthology Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, The Library of America's John Berryman: Selected Poems, the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet anthology Blues Poems, and a companion Jazz Poems.

Kevin Young has an A.B. in English and American Literature from Harvard University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, he is a recent Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and NEA Literature Fellow in Poetry.

Recently named the United States Artists James Baldwin Fellow, Young is currently Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

Website: www.kevinyoungpoetry.com