Ohio Poetry Association Blog

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 ...