The Lindsay J. Cropper Memorial Writers Series: Kevin Young

Location

Manchester Conference Center Auditorium

Free

Dessert reception and book signing to follow. Reading is free and open to the public.

Kevin Young, Poet: Born in 1970, Kevin Young is widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation, one who finds meaning and inspiration in African American music, particularly the blues, and in the bittersweet history of Black America. His many books of poetry include Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011); Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008); and For the Confederate Dead (2007). Black Maria: Poems Produced and Directed by Kevin Young is a "film noir in verse," a playful homage to the language and imagery of Hollywood detective films. Young was a 1993 National Poetry Series winner for Most Way Home, which also received the John C. Zacharis First Book Award of Ploughshares magazine. Other collections include To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor (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; and Jelly Roll: A Blues(2003), a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Young is also the author of a non-fiction book, The Grey Album (Graywolf, 2012), winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, 150 devastatingly beautiful contemporary elegies that embrace the pain, heartbreak, and healing stages of mourning, selected and introduced by Kevin Young, was released in 2010. 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. He is currently Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

Sponsored by The Cropper Center for Creative Writing