Poet, essayist, and former UGA professor Kevin Young  is widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation. 

Born in 1970, he is the author of seven collections of poetry, which include Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Dear Darkness: Poems (2008); For the Confederate Dead (2007); Black Maria (2005); Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003); To Repel Ghosts (Zoland Books, 2001), which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; and Most Way Home (1995), selected for the National Poetry Series and winner of the Zacharis First Books Award from Ploughshares. 

Young recently published his first collection of essays, The Grey Album:  On the Blackness of Blackness, which won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and which The New York Times called “an ambitious blast of fact and feeling, a nervy piece of performance art.”

Young is also the editor of the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner, 2011); The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (Bloomsbury, 2010); Jazz Poems (Everyman’s Library, 2006); Blues Poems (Everyman's Library, 2003) and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000), as well as a selected volume of poems by John Berryman for the Library of America.   

Young's awards and honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and an NEA fellowship. Young has taught at the University of Georgia and at Indiana University; currently, he lives in Atlanta, where he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

Kevin Young