biography » more about Kevin Young
Born in 1970, Kevin Young is widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation. The author of six books of poems, and editor of five others, Young's work has been frequently featured on National Public Radio and in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Callaloo, and other journals and anthologies, including the Best American Poetry 2008, 2009, and 2010. Young often finds meaning and inspiration in African American music, particularly the blues, as well as in the complexities of American history and heartbreak.
Young's latest collection of poems, Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, was published by Knopf in January 2011. A chorus of voices tells the story of the Africans who mutinied on board the slave ship Amistad. Written over twenty years, this poetic epic—part libretto, part captivity epistle—makes the past present, and even its sorrows sing. Library Journal and Booklist gave it starred reviews; Library Journal says, "Writing in blues rhythms, Young achieves a hypnotic effect with repetition, puns, shifts in syntax, ellipsis, and use of the vernacular. Ultimately, his retelling becomes an eloquent examination of slavery as it's felt in the human soul. Highly recommended." The book has been featured widely in print and on radio. The Boston Globe named Ardency one of the Best Poetry Books of 2011.
His most recent anthology is The Best American Poetry 2011, released by Scribner's in fall 2011. The book has garnered great reviews. His previous anthology, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing, was published by Bloomsbury in March 2010. This anthology of contemporary elegies, ranging from Auden to the present, has already been featured in several reviews and even Irish national radio. (Listen) It is also one of the IndieNext top ten poetry books for 2010. Publishers Weekly writes "[Young's] latest anthology is his most topical, and, perhaps, his most useful, gathering poems about suffering and overcoming loss.... While these poems won't offer easy answers to grief, they will keep the kind of company that only poetry can, because only poetry can convincingly say, as Ruth Stone does in the last poem of this book, 'All things come to an end. / No, they go on forever.'"
Booklist writes about the book: "Poet Young, author of six vividly imagined collections, puts on his editor's hat, one he wears well in previous anthologies dedicated to blues and jazz poems as well as here in this unique and invaluable gathering of contemporary poems of grief and healing... Young offers an original and personal analysis of the modern elegy, and uses his own experience with the cycle of mourning to structure the book in sections titled 'Reckoning,' 'Regret,' 'Remembrance,' 'Ritual,' 'Recovery,' and 'Redemption.' And the poems are as diverse and universal as the emotions of loss.”
The late poet Lucille Clifton selected Young's first book, Most Way Home, as part of the 1993 National Poetry Series (William Morrow, 1995). Clifton said at the time "This poet's gift of storytelling and understanding of the music inherent in the oral tradition of language re-creates for us an inner history which is compelling and authentic and American." Most Way Home also went on to receive the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares magazine.
His most recent book of poetry is Dear Darkness, released by Knopf in September 2008, and featured on National Public Radio and in The New Yorker as one of the best books of the year. Dear Darkness also went on to win the Southern Independent Bookseller's Award in poetry. Young's fifth poetry book, For the Confederate Dead, was published in January 2007 by Knopf and won the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the Quill Award for Poetry.
Other collections include To Repel Ghosts (Zoland Books, 2001), "a double album" about artist Jean-Michel Basquiat; the book was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets and released in a "remix" version from Knopf in 2005. Young's Jelly Roll: A Blues (Knopf, 2003) was a named finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize.
Young has been the recipient numerous awards and fellowships, including a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a NEA Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. In December 2009 he was named the United States Artists James Baldwin Fellow.
He is currently Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.
