Yalie Saweda Kamara, Ph.D. is a Sierra Leonean-American poet, writer, professor, public humanist, and researcher from Oakland, California. Kamara was the 2022-2024 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate and was invited for a third year of poet laureate service, concluding her tenure in 2025. She is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University (Cincinnati, Ohio), where she specializes in creative writing, global and diasporic literature, and hip hop studies.
Winner of the 2022-2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Kamara’s debut full-length poetry collection, Besaydoo, was published by Milkweed Editions in January, 2024. Noted in the New York Times Review of Books, Besaydoo is the winner of the 2025 Ohio Book Awards in the category of poetry and was a finalist for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award and the 2025 Firecracker Awards. 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 a part of the New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Tano) series and When The Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017).
Among her honors, Kamara has received fellowships from Academy of American Poets and the National Book Critics Circle and received residencies from the Sewanee Writers Conference, Djerassi, Smith College, and the Vermont Studio Center.
Kamara's poetry, fiction, interviews, and translations have either appeared or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, The Adroit Journal, Callaloo, A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, The Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Prairie Schooner, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Black Camera: An International Journal and elsewhere.
Kamara 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 US, loves Oakland deeply, and has particularly soft spots for Washington DC, Paris, and the Midwest.
Headshot on homepage is attributed to JP Leong.