biography
Photo by Kevin Young
"Highly entertaining, often dazzling, and, as book reviewers like to say—but rarely about contemporary poetry—compulsively readable."
— The New York Times Book Review
"In just ten years since his debut, Young has become a leading poet of his generation."
— Publishers Weekly
Kevin Young is the author of seven books of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011) and Jelly Roll (Knopf, 2003), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of seven other collections, most recently The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Best American Poetry 2011. The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink will also appear from Bloomsbury in fall 2012. Young's book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and appeared from Graywolf Press in March 2012. Young is the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta.
