Alora Young

Alora Young, 18 years old, is the Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States. She is recognized as one of the outstanding young voices of her generation, and has garnered a number of prestigious awards: she is a Presidential Scholar of the Arts, a Scholastic Gold Medalist, a Young Arts winner in Spoken Word, received the Princeton Prize in Race Relations, the Spring Robinson Literary Prize, the Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Award, and the International Human Rights Day Rising Advocate Award. Alora is a two-time TEDx Speaker, and the founder of AboveGround, an organization seeking to create equity in Nashville elementary schools through creative writing and black history. She has publications upcoming, or in the New York Times, Rattle, Washington Post, Signal Mountain Review, Rigorous Mag, and Ice Colony Journal. As a Davidson Fellow Alora has researched and written her soon-to-be published book “Walking Gentry Home” which will be released by Hogarth books in August 2022.  Alora is a freshman at Swarthmore College.