Yalie Kamara

DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Yalie Kamara to the store to discuss and sign her chapbook, When the Living Sing, on Thursday, August 10th at 7:00 pm.

“When The Living Sing is a stunning and lush collection, teeming with bright music. Here, the mouth is a doorway and a dirge to what beckons and consumes the speaker’s tongue declaring, ‘I become a lyre bird mimicking their sound, unsure of what grief means in the hyphen of my African and American throat.’ Here, the ‘pulpy lava bullet’ of the Malombo Fruit tethers memory to family in Sierra Leone and Oakland, California. Here, the elegy is housed in the sanctuary of praise by traversing the distances woven with slices of Krio, Black death, and always finding joy amidst sorrow. Yalie Kamara is a poet with a gorgeous and wild imagination that conjures the ‘opal hue of God’s touch’ and the ‘blueberry gauze of nightfall.’ I never wanted the chapbook to end.” —Tiana Clark, author of Equilibrium

Yalie Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American and native of Oakland, California. Prior to becoming an MFA candidate at Indiana University, she worked in the service of youth and adults all over the state of California in the areas of educational access, nonprofit management,and community-based art facilitation. She holds Bachelors of Arts degrees in Languages and Creative Writing from UC Riverside and a Masters of Arts degree in French from Middlebury College. Among her publications, Yalie’s work has appeared in Vinyl Poetry and Prose, and Entropy Mag. She is a Callaloo Fellow, is a 2017 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow and was a finalist for the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize.