The Collected Works

Kathleen Tankersley Young is one of the great ghosts of modernist literature, a poet and editor thoroughly engrossed in the most exciting stylistic currents of the time, influential in shaping publications and poets alike, and yet almost entirely forgotten after her tragic death in 1933, just shy of her thirtieth birthday. This volume offers the first comprehensive volume of her poetry and short fiction, including all three of the books she published during her lifetime—Ten Poems, The Dark Land, and The Pepper Trees—along with the vast majority of her published works, recovered from magazines large and small, and a selection of nearly forty previously unpublished works. Edited by Erik La Prade and Joshua Rothes, this volume seeks to reintroduce Young as an indispensable poet of mid-period American modernism.

Kathleen Tankersley Young (August 15, 1902–April 9, 1933) was born and raised in rural west Texas. She attended school sparsely, and there is no record of her completing high school or college. She married her first husband, Henry Coulter Young, in 1921, just hours after the death of her mother. Her father was killed in 1924, and her husband died the following year of tuberculosis. Kathleen began publishing poetry in 1926 and, in 1928, had a fateful meeting with a young Charles Henri Ford at the library in San Antonio, Texas that began a key creative partnership—and volatile friendship—with Kathleen playing a crucial role in the formation of Ford's magazine Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms. She also served as an editor for the Denver-based magazine The Echo, and, most notably, as the co-editor of the Modern Editions Poetry series, which published work by Horace Gregory, Carl Rakosi, Paul Bowles, and Kay Boyle, among others. She married again in 1929 to an Air Force lieutenant, David J. Ellinger, to whom she was married until her untimely death under cloudy circumstances in Mexico on April 9, 1933. Her official cause of death was listed as lysol poisoning.