KEVIN YOUNG is the author of ten books of poetry and prose. His most recent poetry collections are Book of Hours, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels; and Dear Darkness. Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, won Graywolf’s Nonfiction Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book for 2012, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and won the PEN Open Award. He is the editor of several collections, most recently The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 and The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink. He is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing & English and curator of Literary Collections & the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University, and served as the Holmes Visiting Poet at Princeton University for spring 2015.
Kevin Young
Past Festivals and Updates:
Yusef Komunyakaa is our featured Thomas Lux Memorial Poet for the 18th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival. On Tuesday, January 11th, Komunyakaa will sit for a conversation with poet and consummate interviewer, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, who inspires ... Read more >
May 20, 2022 – Lake Worth, FL — After a great deal of research, legwork, and many thoughtful discussions, with staff, our board, and our advisory board, it has been decided that we will not ... Read more >
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is no stranger to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She taught workshops here in 2014 and 2018, and next year she returns as the 18thAnnual Festival’s Poet-at-Large. Ideally, the Poet-at-Large visits several schools ... Read more >