Andy Young grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. A graduate of University of North Carolina  at Chapel Hill and Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, is forthcoming in October 2024 from Carnegie Mellon University Press. She has also made four chapbooks and two kids. She has won the Patricia Spears Jones Award, the Nazim Hikmet Award, and has been granted residencies in Virginia, Louisiana, Vermont, and Barcelona.

She and her partner, Khaled Hegazzi, translate poems from Arabic that have been published in Southern Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Norton Anthology Language for a New Century. Together, they founded Meena, a bilingual series aimed at creating a port-of-entry from the cities of New Orleans and Alexandria. During the Egyptian Revolution, they moved to Egypt with their two young kids, where she worked at the American University in Cairo.

Before teaching, she worked as a sushi waitress, bartender, bookseller, jar-filler in a pickle factory, journalist, transcriber, copyeditor, and voice actor. She went into poetry for the money.