Poetry Workshop with Cincinnati Poet Yalie Saweda Kamara - In-Person Option

This is a hybrid event. In-person and virtual registrations are separate. This is the registration for in-person attendance. If you wish to attend virtually (via Zoom), please go to this link:

For our first poetry workshop of 2025, the Ohio Poetry Association is excited to welcome the current Poet Laureate of the City of Cincinnati, Yalie Saweda Kamara.

About the Workshop: “i am runninginto a new year”

In this workshop, whose title is based onthe famed Lucille Clifton poem, poets will reflect on the gifts, struggles, and revelations of 2024 and engage in creative activity that considers world making in 2025. Through a multimedia exploration of surrender, embrace, confession, and celebration, we will endeavor to investigate the following query: How do the vestiges and blossoms from the previous year inform our understanding of and proximity to "possibility" in the newest year?

About the Poet

Yalie Saweda Kamara, Ph.D., is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, educator, and researcher originally from Oakland, California, and the 2022-2024 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate. Invited for a third year of poet laureate service, her tenure will conclude in 2025. She is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University, where she specializes in creative writing and global and diasporic literature.

Winner of the 2022–2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Kamara’s debut full-length poetry collection is Besaydoo (Milkweed Editions, 2024). 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.

In addition to being a featured poet at the 2020 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Kamara's poetry, fiction, interviews, and translations have either appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Callaloo, A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Copper Nickel, Prairie Schooner, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Black Camera: An International Journal, and elsewhere.

Workshop location details

The Mercantile Library
414 Walnut St., 11th Story
Cincinnati, OH 45202
Directions, parking, & more info at mercantilelibrary.com

In-person attendance is limited to 40. This event is open to the public.

Registration closes on Thursday, January 9, 2025, at 5 p.m. EDT.

Donations to OPA are welcome and support OPA's mission of promoting and supporting Ohio poets and poetry.

Check the OPA website for complete event details and follow us on Facebook.

Photo by JP Leong

Host or Publisher Ohio Poetry Association