USM Visiting Writers Series: Kevin Young

A Poetry Reading by Kevin Young

Kevin Young is the author of eight books of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011), winner of an American Book Award, and Jelly Roll (Knopf, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. Young's book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award in criticism. He is the editor of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 (BOA Editions, 2012), The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012), Best American Poetry 2011, and The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. Young's poetry and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Callaloo. His awards include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. 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.