Mai-Linh Hong and Yalie Saweda Kamara

Mai-Linh Hong is a Vietnamese American refugee poet and literary scholar. Her new book is "Continental Drift," winner of the 2025 Trio Award. Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate, says, “How, where, and why we drift after displacement is a central concern in Continental Drift, a marvel of a book that gives dignity to the refugee. The mother laughing in Vietnam with her whole body and ‘a forest of aunties,’ Mai-Linh Hong shares spirit with all of them, and as migration is an American concept, she shares it with all of us. ‘We never finish / making refuge,’ she reminds us. This is an urgent, brilliant debut.” She is the coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals and in They Rise Like a Wave: Anthology of Asian American Women. Her research on Asian American and refugee literatures can be found in Amerasia Journal, Verge, MELUS, and other leading journals and volumes. She is writing a book of hybrid scholarly–lyric essays about refugee storytelling, “Perilous Telling,” ​and has been a Voices of Our Nation Fellow, Tim House Scholar, and Fellow in Environmental Writing at the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches literature at the University of California, Merced. Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American poet, writer, and educator from Oakland. Her debut poetry collection, "Besaydoo," was the winner of the 2022-2023 Jake Adam York Prize and is winner of the 2025 Ohio Book Award in Poetry. It was a finalist for the 2025 CLMP Firecracker Awards, and featured in The New York Times Book Review. Ross Gay says, “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.” Yalie Saweda Kamara is also editor of the anthology, What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration, and is author of two chapbooks: A Brief Biography of My Name, which is a part of the New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set Series, and When The Living Sing. Among her honors, she has received fellowships from Academy of American Poets and the National Book Critics Circle, and residencies from Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, Djerassi, and Smith College. She is the Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate Emerita and 2025 Ohio Poet of the Year. An assistant professor of English at Xavier University, she teaches global and diasporic literature, creative writing, and hip-hop studies.

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