Presenting W. Joe’s Poetry Corner, in which our host W. Joe Hoppe interviews a poet, who will then give a reading and answer questions from audience members. W. Joe’s guest this month is Abe Louise Young.

Abe Louise Young is an independent writer, educator and social justice activist. Her work has won a Grolier Poetry Prize, the Hawai’i Review’s Nell Altizer Award, a Narrative Magazine Story Prize, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing is forthcoming or has appeared in The Nation, WITNESS, New Letters, Feminist Wire and many other journals. She’s the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Heaven to Me (Headmistress Press) and Ammonite (Magnolia Press Collective).

A lifelong social justice advocate, she’s also the author/editor of numerous guides, including Queer Youth Advice for Educators: How to Respect and Protect Your LGBTQ Students; Hip Deep: Opinion, Essays, and Vision from American Teenagers; and an archive of oral histories with Hurricane Katrina survivors, Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History Project. She is currently at work on a storytelling project about human rights abuses in Texas jails, and a memoir.

Young earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James Michener Fellow, and holds a BA from Smith College.