Welcome Yalie!
We are so happy to announce that Dr. Yalie Kamara has joined WordPlay in the role of WordPlay Director of Creative Youth Leadership! Yalie is the Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate and has been a WordPlay Teaching Artist & friend since she moved to Cincinnati 4 years ago.
About Yalie
Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. Selected as the 2022-2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (2-year term), she is the author of A Brief Biography of My Name (African Poetry Book Fund/Akashic Books, 2018) and When the Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017) and the editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration (The Hawkins Project, 2022). Kamara has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series competition and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She earned a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati, an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, Bloomington and an MA in French Culture and Civilization from Middlebury College. For more: www.yaylala.com
