His 2003 book of poems Jelly Roll was a finalist for the National Book Award.Īfter stints at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, Young now teaches writing at Emory University, where he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, as well as the curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a large collection of first and rare editions of poetry in English. He has written on art and artists for museums in Los Angeles and Minneapolis.
In 2007, he served as guest editor for an issue of Ploughshares. Young's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other literary magazines. His Black Cat Blues, originally published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, was included in The Best American Poetry 2005. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective.īorn in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young is the author of Most Way Home, To Repel Ghosts, Jelly Roll, Black Maria, For The Confederate Dead, Dear Darkness, and editor of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers Blues Poems Jazz Poems and John Berryman's Selected Poems. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1992-1994), and received his MFA from Brown University. Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them-of us-poetry can save.Kevin Young is an American poet heavily influenced by the poet Langston Hughes and the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Whether it's the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. "Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don't know / are his dead." "We sleep long, / if not sound," Kevin Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of poems, "Till the end/ we sing / into the wind." In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South-one poem, "Kith," exploring that strange bedfellow of "kin"-the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. A book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, called "one of the poetry stars of his generation" ( Los Angeles Times).
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