Bio

Courtney Young is a writer of fiction, screenplays, popular culture criticism and creative nonfiction. Her fiction has been published in Hypertext Review, Jellyfish Review, and the Stanford Black Arts Quarterly & her nonfiction has been published by venues such as The American Prospect and The Nation. She is a recipient of writing residencies from Willapa Bay Air, Vermont Studio Center, Faber, Hambidge, Bainbridge and Chateau D’Orquevaux. She is the founder of Think Young Media Group, a boutique company that specializes in creating film, TV and documentary projects. Her current projects include completing both her first narrative feature entitled This Savage Life Makes Us Hard to Kill and her first collection of short stories entitled Scar Tissue of the Extraordinary. A graduate of Spelman College and New York University, she received her B.A. in English with a minor in Management and her M.A. from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, completing an interdisciplinary program that combined Entertainment Business, Performance, & Africana studies. 

Project

My time at Faber will be spent editing and workshopping a chapter on colorism in popular culture. Both Lupita Nyong’o and Viola Davis are Academy Award winning actresses with numerous films behind them. Yet, both have remarked on colorism as being one of the biggest hurdles in their road to success and maintaining it. Colorism is rarely covered in critical thought around privilege, discrimination and inequality. My interest lies in the way colorism informs who is seen as desirable and bankable as well as the ways in which it disproportionately affects women.