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. His first book, Most Way Home (William Morrow, 1995), was selected by Lucille Clifton for the National Poetry Series and went on to win the Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares.
He is the editor of seven other collections, including The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing, Best American Poetry 2011, The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink, and Selected Poems: John Berryman for the Library of America. Young’s book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and appeared 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, where Clifton’s papers are housed.