Kevin Young, the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta, has been chosen as the winner of the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. The award honors the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous calendar year and is presented by the American Academy of Poets. The prize comes with a $25,000 cash award.
Professor Young was honored for his poetry collection, Book of Hours (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). He is the author of eight previous collections of poetry. Professor Young is the editor of seven other poetry collections and the author of The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012), which won the PEN Open Book Award and was a finalist in the criticism category for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Professor Young is a graduate of Harvard University and holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Brown University.
