Gary Young (poet)

Gary Eugene Young (born 1951) is an American poet, printer and book artist. In 2010, he was named the first ever Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County.

He graduated from University of California Santa Cruz and University of California, Irvine, with an M.F.A.

His work has appeared in Poetry, Antaeus, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Montserrat Review, ZYZZYVA..

In 1975, he founded Greenhouse Review Press. His print work is represented in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and The Getty Center for the Arts.

His archive is held at Brown University.

He teaches at the University of California Santa Cruz, and has lived near Santa Cruz for thirty years, with his wife and two sons.

In 2012, Young and fellow poet Christopher Buckley published One for the Money: The Sentence as a Poetic Form, A Poetry Workshop Handbook and Anthology through Lynx House Press.

• 2009 Shelley Memorial Award
• National Endowment for the Humanities
• the Vogelstein Foundation
• the California Arts Council
• two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts
• Pushcart Prize
• James D. Phelan Award for The Dream of a Moral Life
• William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, No Other Life
• Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize, Braver Deeds
• first poet laureate, City of [Santa Cruz], CA
• 2013 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America

• Alison Flood (12 March 2009). "'Genius and need' wins prose poet Gary Young Shelley Memorial award". Guardian. 
• http://press.ucsc.edu/text.asp?pid=2775
• http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/03grants/Lit.html

Poetry

• Hands: Poems. Illuminati. 1979. ISBN 978-0-89807-005-7. 
• The Dream of a Moral Life. Copper Beech Press. 1990. ISBN 978-0-914278-56-6. 
• Days: Poems. Silverfish Review Press. 1997. ISBN 978-1-878851-08-6. 
• Braver Deeds: Poems. Gibbs Smith. 1999. ISBN 978-0-87905-866-1. 
• No Other Life. Heyday Books. 2005. ISBN 978-1-59714-004-1. 
• Pleasure. Heyday Books. 2006. ISBN 978-1-59714-023-2. 
• New and Selected Poems, White Pine Press.

Editor

• The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place. Heyday Books. 1999. ISBN 978-1-890771-19-5. 
• Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California. Greenhouse Review Press/Alcatraz Editions. 2008. ISBN 978-0-9655239-4-3. 

Gary Young's is a sensibility unique in American poetry, at once grounded in daily experience in his home in California and yet focused on, tuned to a metaphysical cast, a direction in no small way influenced by deep reading of Asian poetries. A luminous and concrete vision is at the center of his poetry. His recent books employ the prose-poem format exclusively and are shorter constructs, which move the quotidian to a significant level of contemplation and epiphany. His basis is the nature around him, and Young's textures and focuses show the speaker of the poem as part of nature, working within it and accountable to all things for action, thought, and being.