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  • Date: April 28
  • Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm PT

Word Works: Kevin Young on “Throwing Your Voice”

Young’s talk will be about voice and the perils of style, as well as the possibilities of habits and finding new ones. After the talk, the audience will have a chance to ask questions during a Q&A moderated by poet Jane Wong.


Kevin Young is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose including Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf); Book of Hours, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels; and Dear Darkness. His collection Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award or Poetry. Young’s nonfiction book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Award; it was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. 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.

“Kevin Young is one of the most talented poets in the United States. With this new book, he should also become known as a major critic.” — San Francisco Chronicle, reviewing The Grey Album


Jane Wong‘s poems can be found in anthologies and journals such as Best American Poetry 2015, Best New Poets 2012, Pleiades, Third Coast, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Squaw Valley, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She teaches Poetry and Asian American Studies at the University of Washington Bothell and Hugo House. Along with three chapbooks, she is the author of the book Overpour (Action Books), forthcoming this fall.