MacArthur fellow Billie Jean Young is an actor, activist, poet and educator.  She lives in her rural Choctaw County, Alabama hometown of Pennington, from which she travels the world to teach, work with young people, and perform her one-woman play, Fannie Lou Hamer: This Little Light.  

Margaret Rose Gladney, Associate Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, wrote this about Billie Jean Young in her introduction to Young’s book of poetry and drama, Fear Not the Fall (NewSouth Books, 2003):

At first glance, Billie Jean Young's life may be read as a twentieth century American success story:  She was born July 21, 1947 in southwest Alabama's Choctaw County.  Her formal schooling began in a rural one-room school and she graduated from an all-black public high school in 1964. . . . Young earned two degrees from two of Alabama's formerly all-white private colleges.  Not only was she the first African American to graduate from Judson College for women in Marion, Alabama, . . . she did so with distinction and in 1979 became the second African American woman to earn a law degree from Samford University's Cumberland School of Law….  Billie Jean Young's poetry reflects a life of struggle as well as affirmation.  Her poetry honors the tradition of resistance she benefited from as a child . . . the tradition she dramatizes in her acclaimed portrayal of Fannie Lou Hamer —the tradition of making a way out of no way.