Yalie Saweda Kamara, Ph.D. is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, educator and researcher from Oakland, California and the 2022–23 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (two-year term). She joined the English Department of Xavier University as an assistant professor in the fall of 2023.
Winner of the 2022–23 Jake Adam York Prize, Kamara’s debut full-length poetry collection, Besaydoo, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. She is also the editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration (The Hawkins Project, 2022) and the author of A Brief Biography of My Name (Akashic Books/African Poetry Book Fund, 2018), which is part of the New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Tano) series, and When the Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017).
She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow and Callaloo (poetry) and is the winner of the 2023 Meridians Journal Elizabeth Alexander Award for Poetry.
In addition to being a featured poet at the 2020 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Kamara’s poetry, fiction, interviews and translations have either appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Callaloo, A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Black Camera: An International Journal, Puerto del Sol and elsewhere.
A Taft Dissertation Completion Fellow and Philanthropic Educational Organization Named Scholar, she received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing (poetry) and English Literature at the University of Cincinnati. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) from Indiana University, Bloomington and an MA in French Culture and Civilization from Middlebury College.
In between her studies, she worked in the field of social justice, specializing in educational access and arts facilitation. She has lived in France, Brazil and the U.S., and has a particularly soft spot for Oakland, Washington, DC, Paris, and the Midwest.