Kevin Young was born 1970 in Lincoln, Nebraska. He received his B.A. from Harvard University in 1992, where he took poetry workshops with Lucie Brock-Broido and Seamus Heaney, and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Brown University in 1996.

His books of poetry include For the Confederate Dead (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), Black Maria (2005), Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003), To Repel Ghosts (2001), a finalist for the James Laughlin Award, and Most Way Home (1995), selected for the National Poetry Series and winner of the Zacharis First Books Award from Ploughshares.

Young is also the editor of the anthologies Blues Poems (Everymans Library, 2003) and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000), as well as a selected volume of poems by John Berryman for the Library of America. His poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and Callaloo.

About Young's work, the poet Lucille Clifton has said, "This poet's gift of storytelling and understanding of the music inherent in the oral tradition of language re-creates for us an inner history which is compelling and authentic and American."

Young's awards and honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and an NEA fellowship. He taught at the University of Georgia and at Indiana University.Currently, he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University and lives in Boston and Atlanta.