Alora Young is an American poet, actor, and activist born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. As the 2021 Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States, she earned national recognition for spoken word poetry confronting race, identity, and social justice. Her debut collection, Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse (Hogarth/Penguin Random House, 2022), traces nine generations of Black women in her maternal line from enslaved ancestors to her own coming-of-age. It received a starred review in Kirkus and was named a best debut by Ms. Magazine. Young graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in Spoken Word Pedagogy and is the founder of AboveGround, a creative writing and equity program for elementary school students of color.