BESAYDOO Book Launch

Join us for the launch of Besaydoo, the award-winning highly acclaimed debut full-length poetry collection from Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate Yalie Saweda Kamara.

Following this reading, Yalie will be joined in conversation with poet, author and professor Ross Gay. Questions will also be fielded from the audience.

Presented in partnership with The Contemporary Arts Center (CAC). Free & open to the public. Registration required. Copies of Besaydoo are available for preorder HERE.

6:00 pm: Reception
7:00 pm Program
8:15: Book sales & signing

About BESAYDOO

Selected by poet and professor Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language.

Of this collection, Johnson states the following:

“Sometimes, neighborhood is nation. And for the diasporic Black body, the City of Oakland is like a Station of the Cross. In Besaydoo, Yalie Saweda Kamara offers a love song dedicated to her hometown, a place shaped by humor, heartbreak, and humiliation. This debut poetry collection stands alone for its scope and aesthetic dexterity. Here, Kamara is radiant, tender, and true.”

“I love this book. I mean, goddamn, I love this book. I love how hard it tries, how much it loves, how it reaches and wonders and how it bears its bewilderment. I love how it sings, and how it talks. I love what it does with its hurt and its sorrow and its loss and its longing. And I love, maybe most of all, that Besaydoo is a prayer, a prayer for all of us, which Yalie Saweda Kamara reminds us a book sometimes can be.”—Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights

"This is a thunderclap of a collection — so vast in scope, so powerful of voice, so nuanced, so gorgeously evocative that it leaves you wrung out, astounded, and certain that Yalie Saweda Kamara is inimitable and indispensable.”—Dave Eggers

About Yalie Saweda Kamara:

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 and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, she is 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 the chapbooks A Brief Biography of My Name (Akashic Books/African Poetry Book Fund, 2018) and When the Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017). Kamara earned a PhD in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University and resides in Cincinnati.

About Ross Gay:

2023 Hearth & Home Lecturer Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.