CREATURE FEATURE: A Reading Celebrating the late poet Dean Young

Join us Wednesday, October 7th, 7:00pm at Arts and Literature Laboratory: Monsters of Poetry and Copper Canyon Press are honored to host a tribute reading for the late poet Dean Young, who passed away in Cincinnati in 2022. Poets Matt Hart and Dobby Gibson, who co-edited Young’s first posthumous collection Creature Feature (Copper Canyon, 2026), will MC the event, which will also include readings by poets Matthew Guenette and Nicholas Gulig.

Matt Hart, Dobby Gibson, Nicholas Gulig, and Matthew Guenette will read from Young’s work.

Audience members are encouraged to bring one Dean Young poem that means something to them to read, open mic style. Only Young’s poems though, no originals, please.

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Dean Young (1955–2022) was the author of 16 books of poetry and poetic theory and remains one of the most influential and distinct voices in American poetry in the past half century. Drawing from the New York School poets, the Surrealists, the Edo masters, the Romantics, and the found language of everyday American life, Young created an associative and subversive lyric that was entirely his own. Young was the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Colorado Prize for Poetry, a Stegner Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and was named a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Prize. His poetry has appeared widely in publications including American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and in more than a dozen editions of The Best American Poetry series. Among his collections are Solar Perplexus, Bender: New and Selected Poems, Fall Higher, and Creature Feature. Young wrote poems that relentlessly pursued their own freedom, moving dexterously from irreverence to pathos and back again. His art constantly violates the boundary between reality and imagination—and our own expectations of how a poem is supposed to behave. As he once said, “Poetry can be thought of in resistance to conventional ways of thinking.”