PSB Presents: February's Poet of the Month!

Kevin Young

In honor of Black History Month, we're kicking off our Poet of the Month Series with celebrated, African-American poet, Kevin Young. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, and received his MFA from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective.

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young is the author of Most WayHome, To Repel Ghosts, Jelly Roll, Black Maria, For The Confederate Dead, and editor of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers; Blues Poems; Jazz Poems and John Berryman's Selected Poems.

Young’s poetry is visionary, timeless, and extremely pertinent to our times. Prolific and intrepid by nature, Young’s work is an intelligent amalgam of the pure originality and a synthesis of the free voices that helped shape his talent. With the insight and the sensibility of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the experimental spirit of E.E. Cummings, and the candor and humility of Langston Hughes, his poetry is a fresh testament to our generation.

His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, to name just a few. Young's awards and honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and an NEA fellowship. He taught at the University of Georgia and at Indiana University and currently teaches at Emory University, where he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing.

Click below to hear Kevin Young reading a poem from his book April in Paris:



And be sure to check out our in-store display of the poet's work at Porter Square Books!