Events › Author Talk: Yalie Kamara in Conversation with Intisar Khanani

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Yalie Kamara — Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate Emerita and the 2025 Ohio Poet of the Year — will appear at the Downtown Main Library on Sunday, April 26, in the South Building to sign books and discuss her writing. CHPL's current Writer in Residence Intisar Khanani will lead the discussion.

The event will begin at 3:30 p.m., and Yalie will be on hand to sign books until 5 p.m. This event is free and open to the public, and books by both authors will be available for purchase from The Bookery. Part of the event’s proceeds support The Library Foundation. 

About the Author

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. Her 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 Academy of American Poets and the National Book Critics Circle and received 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 

Besaydoo: Poems

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 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.