Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia is hosting a reading by poet, essayist and former UGA professor Kevin Young on April 4 at 8 p.m. at ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, which is located in unit 4 of the Chase Street Warehouses on 160 Tracy St.
Sponsored by the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences creative writing program’s VOX Reading Series, the event is free and open to the public.
Born in 1970, Young is regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, which are Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (2011); Dear Darkness: Poems (2008); For the Confederate Dead (2007); Black Maria (2005); Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003); To Repel Ghosts (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. The New York Times called it “an ambitious blast of fact and feeling, a nervy piece of performance art.”
Young is the editor of the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2011 (2011); The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (2010); Jazz Poems (2006); Blues Poems (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 a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Young taught at UGA and Indiana University. Currently, he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta.
