Alora Young

Alora Young is a Tennessee poet, memoirist, and educator whose work joins family history to the history of the American South. Walking Gentry Home traces the lives of women in her maternal line through a memoir composed in verse. Published by Hogarth in 2022, the book moves across two centuries and uses poetry, family stories, archival fragments, and imaginative reconstruction to recover foremothers whose experiences were rarely preserved in conventional histories. Young served as Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States and studied at Swarthmore College, where she developed performance and community work alongside her writing. Her poems attend closely to inheritance, naming, migration, motherhood, and the ways Black women made lives within unequal social conditions. Walking Gentry Home is therefore both intimate and historical: individual voices build a broader account of memory and survival. Young’s lyrical approach keeps the women at the center, allowing gaps in family history to remain visible while creating a connected family narrative for contemporary readers.