Kevin Young's Book of Hours

Award-winning poet Kevin Young’s eighth volume, Book of Hours, marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Young’s father; the intervening years saw the birth of his son, now seven. His latest collection confronts themes of birth, death, and rebirth, moving between and beyond his life’s milestone events.

“These are poems that have been brewing for a while,” says Young, Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing.

Young taught an advanced poetry workshop at Emory this spring semester, and his students wrote poems based on a series of visiting writers, including Pulitzer Prize–winners Tracy K. Smith, Paul Muldoon, and Sharon Olds, who appeared as part of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series, curated by Young, in March.

Young’s models included Seamus Heaney, who taught him shortly before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. As a teacher he taught him “how to live life as a poet, which I really appreciated.”