Kevin Young, award-winning author of seven books of poetry, will serve as the 2013 Lois and Willard Mackey Chair and give a public reading of his original works.

Mackey Chair
Established in the late 1980s by the late Willard Mackey '47, in honor of his late wife. Lois and Bill first dated on December 7, 1941, when both were Beloit College freshmen. As they were leaving a restaurant in downtown Beloit, they learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Some months later Bill was overseas in the United States Marines, while Lois finished her degree at Beloit. Bill finished his two years later, after the war. He had a brilliant career in advertising. Lois loved literature and was an enthusiastic reader of same. Her memory, and Bill's dedication to the value of creativity, led to the founding of the Lois Mackey Distinguished Writers Program.

Bio

Kevin Young is the author of seven books of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011) and Jelly Roll (Knopf, 2003), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of seven other collections, most recently The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Best American Poetry 2011. The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink will also appear from Bloomsbury in fall 2012. Young's book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and appeared from Graywolf Press in March 2012. Young is the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta. Young will serve as the
The Lois Wilson Mackey '45 Distinguished Professorship of Creative Writing.

This event is free and open to the campus and community.