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Release date: May 10, 2005 Award-Winning Poet Kevin Young Joining Emory University Faculty
"I was drawn to the faculty in creative writing and the quality of students and the university as a whole," says Young. "The Danowski Poetry Collection is a draw as well because it's a terrific statement about the centrality of poetry to intellectual life at Emory." Young is someone whom the creative writing program faculty has been hoping to recruit to Emory for some time. "We've known about Kevin for a long time, since his days teaching at UGA, so when we found out he might be open to a move, we approached him," says Jim Grimsley, director of the creative writing program. "He is one of the most accomplished poets of his age; he's really extraordinary." The English department has only one full-time poet, Natasha Trethewey, so Young also fills a great need on the faculty. In addition to the poetry workshops that he will teach, Young hopes to offer the courses on long-form poetry and African-American film that he has taught in the past, so his addition to the faculty also bolsters the university's offerings in film studies and African-American studies. The role of curator of the Danowski collection is still being defined, but among his duties Young will organize readings related to the collection. He will inaugurate the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series himself with a reading Sept. 8. Emory was given the poetry library in 2004, at the time, the largest library of 20th-century English language poetry in private hands at more than 70,000 volumes. "I'm excited to help promote the collection and represent it. This will be a way to look in depth at some of the authors represented there. I see this as a way to shape the role of poetry at the university," says Young. "In addition to being a rich resource for scholars, the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library is also a center for poets and readers everywhere. As curator Kevin brings considerable creative energy and excitement to that wide ambition," says Stephen Enniss, director of special collections and archives at Emory. He adds that Young also will be working to further build the collection. Young's most recent poetry collection, "Black Maria: Poems Produced and Directed by Kevin Young," was published in February (Alfred A. Knopf). He is the author of three previous collections of poetry and the editor of Library of America's "John Berryman: Selected Poems," Everyman's Library Pocket Poets anthology "Blues Poems," featuring works from Langston Hughes to Gwendolyn Brooks, and "Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers" (HarperPerennial, 2000), which features poetry, fiction and nonfiction by the next wave of black writers. His 2003 collection of blues-based love poems, "Jelly Roll: A Blues," was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Young's first book, "Most Way Home" (William Morrow, 1995; Zoland Books, 2000), was selected for the National Poetry Series and won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. His second book of poems, "To Repel Ghosts" (Zoland Books, 2001), a "double album" based on the works of the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, was a finalist for the James McLaughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His poetry and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, Paideuma, Callaloo, Fence, Verse and elsewhere, and have been featured on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition." A former Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University, Young was named by The Village Voice as a "Writer on the Verge" in 2001, and he was the recipient of a 2003-04 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. |
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