C. Dale Young

C. Dale Young was born in 1969 and grew up in the Caribbean and South Florida. He received a bachelor of science in molecular biology and English at Boston College in 1991 and went on to earn an MFA in English and creative writing and a doctoral degree in medicine, both from the University of Florida.

Young is the author of five poetry collections: Prometeo (Four Way Books, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize; The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016); Torn (Four Way Books, 2011); The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007); and The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern University Press, 2001).

In his review of Torn, Mark Doty writes, “C. Dale Young’s poems employ sly forms of repetition, touching back to phrases we’ve already encountered as if to guide us along the poem’s winding way. How important—and how fierce—these directions turn out to be as his poems push into their deepest territory: the burden of expectation and guilt, the fiercely pressurized experience that an education in the ‘healing arts’ becomes.… [Young] brings all his strength to bear on the necessary work of art, which is also a means of tending and of stitching, a craft that by its very artfulness implies the possibility of hope.”

Young’s honors include the Grolier Prize and the Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. The former poetry editor of the New England Review (1995–2014), Young currently practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He lives in San Francisco.

Bibliography

The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016)
Torn (Four Way Books, 2011)
The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007)
The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern University Press, 2001)