MARBL's Kevin Young Wins Nonfiction Prize

Emory University award winning poet Kevin Young has been awarded the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, designed to honor and encourage the art of literary nonfiction.

Young will receive a $12,000 advance for his manuscript, "The Grey Album: Music, Lying and the Blackness of Being," and the press will publish the collection of essays in spring 2012. The prize is given to an outstanding manuscript by an emerging author who has published no more than two previous works of nonfiction.

Recently named the United States Artists James Baldwin Fellow, Young is Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of literary collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory.

"Of all the short-listed manuscripts, Kevin Young's ‘The Grey Album' stood out for its depth and scope," says Graywolf Press director and publisher Fiona McCrae. "It's truly grappling with some pressing American cultural and racial themes and doing so with great originality and gusto."

Young's latest work is the anthology "The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing," published in March by Bloomsbury. He is the author of six books of poetry, including "Dear Darkness" (Knopf, 2008), winner of the Southern Independent Bookseller's Award in poetry, and "Jelly Roll: A Blues" (2003), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. 

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