Yalie Kamara / Poetry
Yalie Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer and native of Oakland, California. She is the author of two collections of poetry: A Brief Biography of My Name (Akashic Books/African Poetry Book Fund, 2018) and When The Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017). She was a finalist for the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and a 2017 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow. She is also a Callaloo Fellow in poetry. Yalie earned an MA in French Culture and Civilization from Middlebury College and an MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) at Indiana University. She is currently pursuing her PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati, where she is a Yates fellow. In between her studies, Yalie worked in the field of social justice specializing in educational access and arts facilitation. She has lived in France, Brazil and the U.S., and has a particularly soft spot for Oakland, Washington DC, and Paris.