July 18, 1955

Dean Young (July 18, 1955) is an American poet; he has been shortlisted for a Pulitzer (2005). You can get a sense of his charm from his book titles:


Design with X (1988)
Beloved Infidel (1992)
Strike Anywhere (1995)
First Course in Turbulence (1999)
Skid (2002)
Elegy on Toy Piano (2005)
Embryoyo (2007)
Primitive Mentor (2008)
7 Poets, 4 Days, 1 Book, 2009)
The Foggist (2009)
The Art of Recklessness (2010)
Fall Higher (2011)
Bender: New and Selected Poems ( 2012)


From poets.org we learn:

Largely influenced by the New York School of poets, Young combines aspects of experimentation and surrealism. About Young, the poet Charles Simic has said, “Although his work comes out of the poetries of Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery andFrank O’Hara and James Tate, Young has his own voice. The language, the invention, the imagination and the sheer fun of his poems is astounding. It’s not all dazzle either. The poems are also moving. This man reminds us that there is nothing more serious than a joke.”

Young has received a Stegner fellowship from Stanford University, as well as fellowhips from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Young’s awards also include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems have appeared seven times in The Best American Poetry series.

Young has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and at Loyola University, in Chicago. He is currently the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas, in Austin. In 2014, he was appointed the state poet laureate of Texas.

In the book First Course in Turbulence we find a poem titled "Tiger." This excerpt is unformatted as I cannot confirm the author's original layout:

Look of a wren, not dead yet, I pick up to save from the cats look I recognise as my Dad's after they've taken his glasses and teeth, what world he was leaving me unbequeathed, look of a thing unresigned, about to be eaten, what question....

He is married to the fiction writer Cornelia Nixon. They named a cat 'Minnow.'