Lauren K. Alleyne is a Trinidadian American poet, fiction and nonfiction writer, and educator born and raised in the dual-island Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Alleyne serves as Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and a Professor of English at James Madison University. She is author of two collections Honeyfish and Difficult Fruit, two chapbooks Dawn in the Kaatskills and (Un)Becoming Gretel, and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Her award-winning work has been widely published in journals and anthologies internationally, including venues such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Ms.. Alleyne 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 the JMU Agency Star Award and an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virgina.