avery r. young

Avery R. Young is an interdisciplinary artist and teaching artist. He is the author of the poetry collection neckbone: visual verses (Northwestern Press, 2019). Young’s poems and essays have also been published in Cecil McDonald’s photography collection In The Company of Black and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books, 2015), edited Kevin Coval, Nate Marshall, and Quraysh Ali Lansana.

Young’s album booker t. soltreyne: a race rekkid (2015) engages matters of race, gender, and sexuality in the United States during the Obama Era. Young’s work in performance, visual text, and sound design has been featured in several exhibitions and theater festivals, notably the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the American Jazz Museum. He is the featured vocalist on flautist Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening. 

Young’s theater credits include cowriting and co-producing the soundtrack for Lise Haller Baggeson’s Hatorgrade Retrograde: The Musical, scoring Red Clay Dance Company’s Rest.Restore.Nourish.Move.Heal, and writing the libretto for the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Twilight: Gods. Currently, young is working on the libretto for his debut opera, safronia, and the score and script for his first play, maim de looter(s).

The visual artist Theaster Gates has called Young “one of our greatest living street poets [...] one of the most important thinkers on the Black experience.”

The recipient of a 2022 Leader for a New Chicago Award and a 2022 Meier Achievement Award, young lives in Chicago. In 2023, he was appointed the inaugural poet laureate of Chicago. In 2024, Young received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.