Al Young was appointed Poet Laureate of the State of California in Spring 2005. His many books include
The Sounds of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000, which received the Before Columbus American
Book Award in 2002, Heaven: Poems 1956-1990, Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs (with Janet Coleman), and
several novels, among them Who is Angelina? and Sitting Pretty. 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 color-
ful 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.

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).