and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize.
Young has held a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. He is currently Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and Curator of Literary Collections and the Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.
Visit : http://www.kevinyoungpoetry.com
I first met poet Kevin Young on a winter night at the Vermont Studio Center. He was the visiting writer and we didn't know what to expect from such a well--known poet. He turned out to be warm, engaging and funny as hell. Conversations with Kevin covered a wide range of topics, from hot sauces and obscure bands to poetry and the difference between tone and style. "We have many voices" he said. During our craft talk with him. Kevin also said the poets he finds interesting "think that poetry is the most important thing in the world, but at the end of the day it's just poetry." Reading Kevin Young's poetry is as good as being around him. His work is infused with grace, weight and collective story.
His newest book of poetry is Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008), released in September 2008, was featured on National Public Radio and in The New Yorker's best books of last year.
His fifth book, For the Confederate Dead, was published in January 2007 and won the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the Quill Award for Poetry. Young's first book Most Way Home was a 1993 National Poetry Series winner for Most Way Home, his first book, selected by Lucille Clifton. A volume of meditations on the meaning of "home" in the collective memory of African Americans, Most Way Home (Morrow, 1995) also received the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize Award of from Ploughshares magazine. Other collections include To Repel Ghosts (Zoland Books, 2001), a poetic tribute to painter and graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets ("remix" version, Knopf, 2005);
the crowd: cool it. A riot
onstage, heartache
rehearsed, practiced, don't dare
be late or miss a note
or you'll find yourself fined
fifty bucks. A fortune. Even
the walls sweat. A God-
father's confirmation suit,
his holler, wide-collared, grits
& greens. Encore. Exhausted
after, collapsed, carried
out, away, off-not on a gurney,
no bedsheet over
his bouffant, conk
shining, but, boots on,
in a cape glittering bright
as midnight, or its train.
