PsHares.org
Title
Ploughshares, the literary journal
Description
Walking through Kevin Young’s house outside of Boston is like taking a physical journey through his poetry. Something of a collector, he’s filled his home with old books and photographs, contemporary art, vinyl records, and other cultural memorabilia. “I’m a pack rat,” says Young. “I keep everything.” It started when he was a kid, collecting comic books, many of which he still owns. And though the impulse has matured to include signed first editions by Langston Hughes, for example, there seem to be equal parts reverence and playfulness in the accumulations of objects that decorate his living room, or how he’s equally at home discussing the Harlem Renaissance as he is, say, the X-Men.
Young puts this inclusive mentality to good use in his poems, which are kinetic and vibrant, ambitious book-length sequences that take on personal and public histories, and often sing themselves through other art forms. It’s easy to see them taking shape amid the tumult of influences that comprise his individual universe. He seems to think in books, which might be one reason why his collections resemble novels, both in length and in scope. “I’ve tried to write short poems, or short books,” he says. “It’s not just the depth, because you could write a ten-page deep book, but that sense of trying to get the world into the book that I like.” Simply put, there are no other contemporary poetry books on the shelf quite like his.
Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1970, but moved with his family several times before they settled in Topeka, Kansas, where he remained until college. A lesser individual might consider this an inauspicious beginning, but far from decrying his Midwestern background, Young asserts, “I think there’s a lot of interesting history regarding Kansas, both its history as a state and being a free state, and also just in general its cultural history—Langston Hughes grew up in Kansas, in part, and Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka. There’s this connection I feel to the black folks who live there.” Young was turned on to poetry in his early teens by a creative writing teacher, whom he still calls a friend. “We all had to write a poem, and he sort of anonymously picked mine. And then I just couldn’t be stopped; I just kept writing them,” Young says. That initial precociousness would come to define his career. Since then, he’s led a kind of charmed existence, studying with Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido at Harvard University, being awarded a Stegner Fellowship directly out of college, and then going on to earn his M.F.A. at Brown University. While still at Harvard, he also became a member of the Dark Room Collective, an influential group of young African-American writers in Boston who hosted readings and dedicated themselves to advancing the work of their members. To date, Young has published four collections of poetry, with two more on the way, and edited three anthologies. A fourth anthology is due out soon aswell. Young’s first collection, Most Way Home, was selected by Lucille Clifton for the National Poetry Series, and later won Ploughshares’s John C. Zacharis First Book Award, achievements all the more remarkable considering the bulk of it was written while he was still an undergraduate. He’s won numerous other honors for his writing, including the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship, and he’s been named a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the James Laughlin Award, and the National Book Award. Since his third book, his publisher has been Knopf, the most prestigious house in the country. All by the ripe age of thirty-five.
Languages
English
Address
- Emerson College 120 Boylston St
- Boston MA 02116 US
Contact
- Ploughshares
- 1 617 824 8753, Fax: 1 617 824 8991
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Additional Information
Related Domains
External Links
- Alexa: PsHares.org
