Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania in 1955. He received his MFA from Indiana University.[1]
In 2008, Young became the William Livingston Chair of Poetry of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.[2]
His later books included Solar Perplexus, Bender: New and Selected Poems, and Fall Higher.
In an interview,[3] Young said his poems are about misunderstanding and that tying meaning too closely with understanding is not the intent of his poetry. He found the process of creation to be more important than the work itself: his poems are more demonstrations than explanations. He also found that using mangled quotes from technical journals, as he experimented with in First Course in Turbulence, allowed for a kind of collage in which tones confront each other. Citing Breton as an influence, Young found surrealism useful in understanding the imagination and removing the boundaries between real and unreal.
In 2011, Young had a heart transplant. The possibility of his death and encounters with impermanence became frequent themes in his poetry, especially in Fall Higher, which was published days after his transplant.[4]
Young died from complications of COVID-19 at Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, on August 23, 2022. He was 67.[5][6] In announcing his passing, Copper Canyon Press also shared that Young had submitted an as-yet unpublished manuscript, whose final lines were: "Some cries never reach us/Even though they're our own. The best endings are abrupt."[7]
