About

Élan Young holds a BA in public policy from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA in creative writing from UNC-Greensboro. 

Her freelance endeavors have led her to interview Joy Harjo, the first Native American Poet Laureate and US Senator Tammy Duckworth. In 2016, Élan received a Golden Press Card Award from the East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists for her contribution to coverage of the East Tennessee wildfires of 2016. “Fire on the Mountain: What It’s Really Like to Be Caught in a Wildfire” was one of her cover stories in Knoxville Mercury before the local independent folded.

In 2019, one of Young’s colleagues at the University of Tennessee—where she was a writer for the Tickle College of Engineering—made a chance discovery in a 1966 mining journal that was headed for the dumpster. While perusing the journal he stumbled on a story written by the president of a coal research group that acknowledged the impending catastrophic impacts on the earth’s atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.

After sharing his findings with Young, she broke the news in HuffPost. “Coal Knew, Too” is an investigative exposé built on the prior reporting that Exxon knew about climate change in the 1970s. (Subsequent reporting showed that the oil industry likely knew about these impacts as early as the 1950s.)

“Coal Knew, Too” revealed that it wasn’t just oil companies engaging in deceitful tactics to cast doubt about climate science. The story gave archival evidence that the industry had issued a public warning about the effects of climate change in 1966 before funding four decades of disinformation using the same PR firms that got Americans hooked on tobacco. The story earned Young nominations for the George Polk Award and the John B. Oakes Award in journalism.

Following the publication of “Coal Knew, Too,” a think tank founded by a right-wing conspiracy theorist filed a public-records lawsuit against Young’s employer over access to emails surrounding the story, stirring up a controversy about whether university emails are considered public records. The judge said no, at least not in this case. Young testified on behalf of her former employer that UT had not commissioned or pressured her to write the story, which she pursued as a freelance writer.

Her work has appeared in Smithsonian.com, HuffPost, Sojourners, 3:AM Magazine, Smoky Mountain Living, Greensboro Review, and others. She is a frequent contributor to Hellbender Press, a Southern Appalachian environmental news publication.

Young lives and writes in East Tennessee in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains on the banks of the Little River with her husband and son. In 2020, she became a “900-Miler” by hiking all the trails in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where she took her first backpack trip in 2001. Now she’s an advocate for farmland preservation in Tennessee. In 2021 she joined the board of Citizens Against the Pellissippi Parkway Extension, a 24-year-old citizen group that has fought a proposed highway that would destroy one of the last remaining century family farms in her county that is also a gateway for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a global recreation destination and the most visited national park in the U.S.