Kevin Young is the author of Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels; Dear Darkness; For the Confederate Dead; Book of Hours and the “film noir in verse” Black Maria. Young was a 1993 Nation Poetry Series winner for Most Way Home, a finalist for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets for To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Jelly Roll: A Blues. Young is also the author of a non-fiction book, The Grey Album, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the 2013 PEN Open Book 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. Young is currently Charles Howard Candler of Creative Writing and English, curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, and director of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series at Emory University.