Abe Louise Young was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas, an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and a BA in Poetics and Community Literacy from Smith College. She is the editor of an anthology, Hip Deep: Opinion, Essays, and Vision from American Teenagers (Next Generation Press, 2006) and the author of two poetry chapbooks.
Her work has received a James Michener Fellowship, the Nell Altizer Prize in Poetry from the Hawai’i Review, a Best of Austin Award, a Beinecke Scholarship, a Danish-American Dialogue on Human Rights Fellowship, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and other honors. Young’s poems and prose have appeared in New Letters, the Massachusetts Review, Bloom, Verse Daily, Terrain.org, The Texas Observer and more.
Young has taught creative writing workshops in schools, housing projects, prisons, and homeless shelters. In 1996, as a Human Rights Fellow, she interviewed Holocaust rescuers in Denmark, and contributed oral histories to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1997, she assisted poet Elizabeth Alexander in launching the Poetry Center at Smith College and served as Alexander’s assistant for two years. Young graduated from Smith in 1999, and received an M.A in Performance Studies from Northwestern University in 2001. In 2002, she worked as an Instructor of English and Communications at Loyola University, Chicago, and in 2003, she was awarded a James Michener Fellowship in Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2004, as part of a Fellowship team, Young documented the life stories of ethnic minorities in rural Texas with the Project for Interpreting the Texas Past. In 2005, she recorded life stories of civic leaders for the Jewish Women’s Archive, and following Hurricane Katrina, she founded Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History Project, which recorded the oral histories of African-Americans displaced by the hurricane. Between 2003 and 2007, Young worked as a freelance education journalist for the national newswire What Kids Can Do, Inc., profiling innovative service learning projects in public schools around the U.S. In 2007, she taught elementary language arts at the Austin EcoSchool, and in 2009, she founded Beyond Words Workshop. Her first collection of poetry, Little Big Bang, was a finalist for the 2009 Perugia Press Prize. She is also at work on a book of stories about the Katrina disaster co-authored with displaced New Orleanians, and on a memoir about race, gender, and childhood in the Deep South.
