photo: P. James Fotos

Dean Young was born in 1955 in Columbia, Pennsylvania. His books of poems include Skid (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002); First Course in Turbulence (1999); Strike Anywhere (1995), which won the Colorado Poetry Prize; Design with X (1988); and Beloved Infidel (1992). He has received a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a Stegner fellowship from Stanford, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. His poems have appeared three times in The Best American Poetry series. He is on the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and also teaches in the Warren Wilson low-residency MFA program. He splits his time between Iowa City and Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Cornelia Nixon.