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 and is the winner of the 2025 Ohio Book Award in Poetry. 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). Among her honors, Kamara has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the National Book Critics Circle as well as residencies from the  Sewanee Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, Djerassi, and Smith College. Kamara earned a PhD in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University. An assistant professor of English at Xavier University, she teaches courses in global and diasporic literature, creative writing, and hip-hop studies. For more, please visit her website: www.yaylala.com