Shay Youngblood

Writer, Visual Artist, Teacher, and Mentor

Shay Youngblood is a Georgia born writer, visual artist, teacher and mentor. She is author of the novels Black Girl in Paris and Soul Kiss and collections of short fiction. Her published plays have been widely produced. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Pushcart Prize for fiction, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, an Edward Albee honoree, several NAACP Theater Awards, an Astraea Writers’ Award for fiction and a New York Foundation for the Arts Sustained Achievement Award.

Youngblood received her MFA in Playwriting from Brown University. She taught Creative Writing to faculty and graduate students at NYU and has been Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi and Texas A&M Universities among others. In 2011 she was awarded a five month residency by the National Endowment for the Arts sponsored Japan-US Creative Artist Fellowship to conduct research on architecture and memory in Japan.