Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young’s maternal and paternal families hailed from Louisiana. During his childhood, he lived in Boston, Syracuse, and Chicago before his family settled in Topeka, Kansas, where he attended high school. Young began writing poetry when he was thirteen, while taking a summer fiction and poetry workshop led by writer Thomas Fox Averill.
Young left Kansas to attend Harvard University where he studied under poets Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido. He also became a member of the Dark Room Collective, a circle of African American poets founded by Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He later earned a Master of Fine Arts from Brown University and won a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University. Additional fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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