Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, researcher, and educator from Oakland, CA. She is the Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate Emerita and the 2025 Ohio Poet of the Year. Kamara's debut poetry collection, Besaydoo (Milkweed Editions, 2024), was the winner of the 2022-2023 Jake Adam York Prize, as well as the 2025 Ohio Book Award in Poetry. Kamara’s work has been described as an “elegantly wrought love song for diasporic peoples and places in this country and beyond… [rendering] a touchstone for all those still wandering in search of a home to call their own” (Milkweed Editions). Among her many honors, Kamara has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the National Book Critics Circle. Junious Ward from The Rumpus writes that “each line in Kamara’s work has this kind of… blossoming narrative effect pushing us beyond surface-level meanings, compelling us toward a new landscape.”
Kamara 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). An assistant professor of English at Xavier University, Kamara teaches courses in global and diasporic literature, creative writing, and hip-hop studies. For more, please visit her website: www.yaylala.com
Kamara’s reading will be followed by conversation with Matt Donovan in Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, April at 7 p.m. Free & open to the public. Books will be sold and a signing will follow. Livestream also available on the BDPC YouTube page.
