Born May 31 1939 at Ocean Springs, Mississippi on the Gulf Coast near Biloxi,
Al Young grew up in the South and in Detroit. From 1957-1960 he attended the University of Michigan, where he co-edited Generation, the campus literary magazine. In 1961 he emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area. Settling at first in Berkeley, he held a variety of colorful jobs (folksinger, lab aide, disk jockey, medical photographer) before graduating from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Spanish. From 1969-1976 he was Edward B. Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford near Palo Alto, where he lived and worked for three decades. In 2000 he moved back to Berkeley.
Young has taught poetry and fiction writing at U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Santa Cruz, U.C. Davis, Foothill College, the Colorado College, Rice University, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, the University of Arkansas, and San José State University. In the spring of 2003 he taught poetry at Davidson College (Davidson, NC), where he was McGee Professor in Writing. In the fall of 2003, he will be Coffey Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC.
His honors include Wallace Stegner, Guggenheim, Fulbright National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fiction, two American Book Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and two New York Times Notable Book of the year citations.Young's many books include novels, collections of poetry, essays, memoirs and anthologies. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, the New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Letters, Chelsea, Rolling Stone, and the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. He has written film scripts for Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor. In 2001 he traveled to the Persian Gulf to lecture on African American literature and culture in Kuwait and in Bahrain for the U.S. Department of State.
Al Young travels internationally and extensively, reading, lecturing and often performing with musicians. His poetry and prose have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, and other languages. Current projects: A Piece of Cake (a novel), Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: Or, Opus de Funk (an account in verse of Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb's infamous romance), a screen adaptation of Seduction By Light, his 1988 Hollywood novel); volume two of The Literature of California, co-edited with scholar-critic Jack Hicks, and novelists James D. Houston and Maxine Hong Kingston, and CitiZen: Spirit & Democracy, a collection of column-length dialogues between Young and O.O. Gabugah on the current state of democracy in the U.S. (inspired by Langston Hughes' Simple Speaks His Mind).