" Listening to Kara Young is like listening to springtime” –Rah B

Kara Young taught herself how to play the guitar at the age of 10 when she discovered her mother’s old Goya buried in the attic. Although she spent years playing covers of other people’s music, in the summer of 2001 Kara began to write her own, recording her first album in 2002 and her second album a year later. She has been a feature performer at fundraisers, protests, political events, and coffee houses and has played solo shows at such venues as Borders Books and Music, the Hourglass Café, and Pasand Lounge. From 2003 to 2006, Kara also performed at Brown University with the acappella performance group Shades of Brown, which was an experience that deeply inspired her to begin experimenting with richer harmonies in her own music. She is currently working on a solo poetry/song project called MoonRhymes in which she is twittering in haiku and using those poems as inspiration for an album of songs and a performance piece called Running Reeling Revelations. She also sings occasionally with The Getback in Oakland, with whom she has performed at Yoshi’s, The Shattuck Down Low, Coda, and Pier 23.
Kara is originally from Cleveland, Ohio and received her BA in Sociology from Brown University in 2006. She is currently a doctoral student in the department of Sociology at UC Berkeley where she studies the creative process of hip hop artists in the Bay Area. Academically, her work revolves around class, race, gender, power, post-incarceration and transnational feminist theories. Personally, her work involves poetry, prose, art and music as avenues for discussions about the intersections of sexuality, race, gender and love. She has led numerous creative writing workshops, specifically for women of color and women recovering from drug and alcohol abuse, and she is currently co-teaching a course on literature adaptation and songwriting at San Quentin State Prison with the Getback. Kara is also co-editing a collection of essays on gender and hip hop with cultural critic Bakari Kitwana, Does Hip Hop Hate Women?, that is scheduled for publication in the Spring of 2011.