Poetry Reading Features Gary Young

Gary Young, lecturer in creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will read his poetry Thursday, Oct. 29, at 7 p.m. in Westmont’s Adams Center for the Visual Arts, room 216. The Westmont Reading Series event, supported in part by Poets & Writers through grants from the James Irvine Foundation and the Hearst Foundations, is free and open to the public. Books will be available for sale and signing.

Young, who is also an artist and printer, has earned numerous awards and grants. These include recognition from the Poetry Society of America, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award (2013), the Shelley Memorial Award (2009), the William Carlos Williams Award (2003), and the Lyric Poem Award (2001). He received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and the Vogelstein Foundation among others. He was the Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year (2012) and the first Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County (2010-11).

His print work is represented in the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Getty Center for the Arts, and special collection libraries throughout the country. He directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.

“He is a gentle and perceptive soul whose poetry is authentically rooted in the landscapes of northern California,” says Paul Willis, Westmont professor of English and former Santa Barbara Poet Laureate (2011-13). “At the same time, Gary is a secretary of human pain who does not let us escape life’s difficulties.  In recent years Gary has become a master of the prose poem — short paragraphs that soothe and sting with amazing brevity.  He is also an artist and an old-fashioned book maker and designer. We are fortunate to have him visit Westmont.”

He has written more than a dozen books of poetry, including “Even So: New and Selected Poems,” “Pleasure,” and “No Other Life.”