Yasmine Shamma is Professor of Literature at the University of Hull. She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut, an MA from Georgetown University, and a PhD from the University of Oxford.
She is the author of Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry (OUP, 2018), the editor of Joe Brainard's Art (EUP, 2019), lead editor of Migration Culture and Identity (Palgrave, 2023), interviewer / curator of Conversations with the New York School: Not Really Real (EUP, 2024), and author of over a dozen peer-reviewed articles and interviews. She is currently completing a monograph, Forms of Displacement, which attends to the shapes conversations around displacement take in literary forms, and Words for Home, a creative non-fiction trade book on what refugees and the displaced make of "home" when it is lost. In 2024, Words for Home was announced the winner of the PEN/American Jean Stein Oral History Prize, for offering "compelling prose" which "insists that migration crises can have never-ending and multi-generational consequences."
Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Magazine, the American Book Review, The Review of English Studies, Jacket, Empty Mirror, and PN Review, and other publications. In 2019 her work on refugee senses of home in displacement was awarded an international British Academy grant, which supported the curation of a digital archive on migration. In 2020, she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, for her study of the refugee experience of home-making. In 2021 she was awarded further grants and fellowships for her work on testimonies of displacement, including an Arts Council Grant. Alongside Rona Cran, she is also co-founder and co-director of the Network for New York School Studies , which is supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She has judged several poetry prizes, and serves as a peer-reviewer for UK funding bodies. She often engages public audiences on the topic of migration through radio and TV interviews with the BBC. She has also delivered invited key note speeches to international conferences from the US to Europe.
In her spare time she organises writing and reading workshops for refugees, in efforts to offer space for the processing of the trauma of displacement in art, pursing the possibility of cultivating refuge in writing.
For all writing enquiries please contact Kesia Lupo ([email protected]). For speaking engagements please contact here.
