“Young is a virtuoso.” – Booklist
Poet Kevin Young‘s work crosses vernaculars. Equally at home in the language of the blues, the patois of the South and its culinary delights, the lexicon of loss, and the expression of new life, Young’s career began as a founding member of the Black Room Collective, a Cambridge-based forum for emerging black writers. Since those formative years, Young has become an award-winning writer, leaving an indelible mark on the world of contemporary poetry. He visits Scripps to share poems from his latest anthology, Blue Laws, and to discuss his work from the last two decades with Los Angeles-based writer, Jervey Tervalon.
Young has previously authored seven books of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, winner of a 2012 American Book Award, and Jelly Roll, a finalist for the National Book Award. Young’s book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book, among other accolades. He is currently the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English, curator of Literary Collections, and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.
Jervey Tervalon was born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles, and received his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine where he worked with Thomas Keneally. He is the author of six books including Understanding This, for which he won the Quality Paper Book Club’s New Voices Award and the Los Angeles Times bestseller Dead Above Ground. His new novel, Monster’s Chef was published June 2014. Currently he is the Executive Director of “Literature for Life,” literary magazine and educational advocacy organization, and Literary Director of The Pasadena LitFest. An award-winning poet, screenwriter, dramatist and Disney Screen Writing Fellow, Tervalon teaches at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He splits time between Los Angeles and Shanghai with his wife, Jinghuan LiuTervalon and their kids.
This program is presented in partnership with the Alexa Fullerton Hampton ’42 Endowed Speaker Fund and the Scripps College Writing Program.