Kevin Young is the author of seven books of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011), winner of an American Book Award, and Jelly Roll (Knopf, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of seven other collections, including The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink. Young's book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and was just named a New York Times Notable Book for 2012. Young is the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta.