Al Young

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Al Young (born May 31, 1939) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger named Poet Laureate of California on May 15, 2005.

The Governor commended Young as Poet Laureate for his service: "He is an educator and a man with a passion for the Arts."

Poetry's extraordinary talent and zealous desire to bring poetry into the lives of Californians is an inspiration. "As jazz, Al Young is an original American voice," California Arts Council Director Muriel Johnson said. Young's books include novels, collections of poetry, essays, and memoirs.

His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, The New York Times, Chicago Review, The New York Times, Seattle Review, Rolling Stone, The Gathering of the Tribes, and anthologies including the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and the Oxford Anthology of African American Literature.

Early life

Born May 31, 1939, in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, near Biloxi, Mississippi. His maternal grandparents were both sharecroppers. Young was enrolled in "Kingston School for Colored," a segregated school in the South. He graduated from Central High School in Detroit in 1957.

He attended the University of Michigan from 1957 to 1960. He co-edited Generation, the university literary magazine, at the University of Michigan. In Michigan, he later co-authored work with Janet Coleman, whom he later coauthored in 1989.

In 1961, he moved to San Francisco Bay, California. He started in Berkeley, California, where he worked in a variety of positions (including folksinger, lab assistant, disk jockey, medical photographer, clerk typist, and employment consultant). He graduated with distinction from University of California (UC Berkeley) in 1969, with a degree in Spanish.

Family life and death

Arline June Young, a technical writer and editor who lived from 1963 to her death in 2016, he was married to technical writer and editor Arline June Young (née Belch). They had only one child. Young went to Berkeley, where he continued to freelance, after living in Palo Alto from 1969 to 1999.

Young suffered a stroke in February 2019. On April 17, 2021, he died of heart disease complications caused by the stroke in Concord, California, at the age of 81.

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Career and teaching

Young wrote poetry, fiction writing, and American literature at UC Berkeley, Santa Cruz, California, from 1983 to the early 1990s; University of California, Davis; Bowling Green State University; Rice University; the University of Washington; and the University of Arkansas; and the University of Arkansas; 1968.

Edward B. Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University near Palo Alto, where he lived and worked for three decades from 1969 to 1976.

Joseph Strick, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor wrote film scripts in the 1970s. He also wrote linear notes for George Benson's Breezin's (1976) album.

He was named Lurie Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at San José State University in 2002.

He taught at Charles University in the Czech Republic as part of the Prague Summer Programs. He taught poetry at Davidson College (Davidson, NC), where he was McGee Professor of Writing in 2003. He taught a poetry workshop at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, in the fall of 2003. He served on the faculty of Cave Canem's summer workshop retreats for African-American writers from 2003 to 2006.

Persis Karim, a poet, was one of his students.

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