Kevin Young's first collection, Most Way Home (1995), won the Zacharis First Book Award from the literary magazine Ploughshares and features a somewhat wider variety of form than is found in Jelly Roll.

One of Young's favorite poetry collections is Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), by the groundbreaking African American intellectual Langston Hughes.

Another collection of poems admired by Young, especially in that it originally brought him to the realization that poetry could speak of the profoundly personal, is Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah (1986).

Young has been compared to the poet Yusef Komunyakaa. Komunyakaa's collection Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (1993) includes samplings from earlier works as well as original material and earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994.

Young has cited “Blues People: Negro Music in White America” (1963), by Imamu Amiri Baraka, who was originally named LeRoi Jones...