Lauren K. Alleyne (she/her) serves as Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and a Professor of English. She is author of two collections Honeyfish (2019), Difficult Fruit (2014), two chapbooks Dawn in the Kaatskills and (Un)Becoming Gretel, and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies internationally, including venues such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Ms., among several others. Alleyne, who hails from the twin island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, has been recognized with a US Artist Award nomination (2023), an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Poetry (2020), the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press (2017) and has been shortlisted for the BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature and the Library of Virginia prize for poetry (2020). In 2022, Alleyne was awarded an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virgina, and the JMU Agency Star Award. 

Selected Publications