Shay Youngblood

Shay Youngblood is a novelist and playwright. Her plays include, Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery, a Lorraine Hansberry Award-winning drama.

Reading has been one of Shay Youngblood’s most enjoyed activities since the moment, as a child, when she could first understand the words on the page. She writes: "From the time I got my first library card I wanted to read all the books in the world. The best dream I’ve ever had, next to the flying dream, was the one in which I lived in a library."

Youngblood is a board member of both Yaddo artists’ colony and the Authors Guild. She has taught Creative Writing at NYU and was the 2002-03 John and Renee Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. She also taught writing at the Syracuse Community Writer’s Project as well as playwriting at the Rhode Island Adult Institution for Women and Brown University.