Word Works: Kevin Young on Throwing Your Voice

Kevin Young discusses voice and the perils of style, as well as the possibilities of habits and finding new ones, for Hugo House's Word Works: Writers on Writing series. Poet Jane Wong leads a Q&A following the talk.
This event took place on April 28, 2016 at Hugo House.
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
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About Hugo House's Word Works series:
For those who sit and stare in wonder at a sentence, a turn of phrase, or a particularly great execution of a literary device, marveling at how they could come about, Word Works talks show writers at their most revealing.
These craft talks by novelists, essayists, poets, and memoirists focus on writing as process rather than finished product, examining how language works to inspire and provoke new ideas through live close readings of the writer’s own or others’ work. These talks are designed to apply to writers of all genres as well as illuminate well-known works for avid readers. The talks are followed by an interview with a noted editor, writer, or critic.