Yalie Saweda Kamara named 2025 Ohio Poet of the Year

Congratulations to Yalie Saweda Kamara, Ph.D., who the Ohio Poetry Day Association has selected as 2025 Ohio Poet of the Year for her book Besaydoo [2024, Milkweed Editions]. 

Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language.

A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies with "a story pulsing in every blood cell." In Besaydoo, Kamara serves as griot for the Freeborn in Oakland, the Sierra Leonean in California, the girl straddling womanhood, the woman re-discovering herself. "I am made from the obsession of detail," she writes, setting scenes from her own multifaceted legacy in sharp relief: the memory of her mother's singing, savory stacks of lumpia, a church where "everyone is broken, but trying." A multitudinous witness.

Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languages—Krio, English, French, poetry's many dialects--to highlight mechanisms not just for survival, but for abundance. "I make myth for peace," she writes, as well as for loss, for delight, for kinship, and most of all for a country where Black means "steadfast and opulent," and "dangerous and infinite." She writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.

But in Besaydoo, there is no partition between the living and the dead. There is no past nor present. There is, instead, a joyful simultaneity—a liberating togetherness sustained by song.

Yalie Saweda Kamara, Ph.D., is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California and the 2022-2025 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate. She an assistant professor of English at Xavier University, where she specializes in creative writing and global and diasporic literature.

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).

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.

Lear more about Kamara at her website: www.yaylala.com.

As Ohio Poets of the Year, Sabol and Reid join the likes of Mary Oliver, David Baker, Kari Gunter-Seymour, and Maggie Smith. 

[Please note: I will post more information about this year's Ohio Poetry Day celebration as soon as I receive it.]