Reggie Scott Young

I am a poet, fiction writer, and writer of creative nonfiction. I grew up in Chicago and spent my early adult years as a community poet, and participated in a writers’ group with Sandra Cisneros. In fact, Sandra and I taught a historic poetry workshop in the city titled City Songs, and I will teach a workshop by the same name here in San Antonio this summer (2022) for Gemini Ink. I attended graduate school at the University of Illinois at Chicago and earned a PhD in creative writing. My dissertation was a multi-genre novel titled Crimes in Bluesville. Several chapters of the novel were published as chapbooks and in magazines and journals. I worked in higher education for nearly 25 years at schools such as Villanova University, LSU, Wheaton College, and the University of Louisiana. During that time I worked as both a scholar and writer, publishing scholarly articles and essays. I also served as co-editor on two books on Ernest J. Gaines, including Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays and I wrote the introduction to that collection. While at the University of Louisiana, I became a member of San Antonio’s Macondo Workshop in 2009 and began to make regular visits to San Antonio to attend Macondo activities. After I decided to leave higher education to spend more time on my work as a writer, I decided to move to San Antonio.