Kevin Young is the author of four poetry collections and editor of four others. His first book, Most Way Home, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Lucille Clifton and later won the Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares. Young's second book, To Repel Ghosts, a "double album" based on the work of the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, was a finalist for the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets and was reissued in a "remix" version in 2005. Young's third poetry collection, Jelly Roll, won the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His latest collection is Black Maria, a film noir in verse, which is being produced for the stage by the Providence Black Repertory Theater.

Young's poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, and many other journals. He is editor of the anthology Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, The Library of America's John Berryman: Selected Poems, the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet anthology Blues Poems, and, most recently, a companion Jazz Poems. 

Kevin Young has an A.B. in English and American Literature from Harvard University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, he is a recent Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and NEA Literature Fellow in Poetry. He has also taught at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, where he was the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry. Currently he is Atticus Haygood Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing and Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a 75,000-volume-rare-book library housed at Emory.