Named the 2021 Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States, Alora Young was raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in Spoken Word Pedagogy and a minor in Religion. Her debut, Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse (Hogarth, 2022), received a starred Kirkus review and was named a best debut by Ms. Magazine.
