Dr Yasmine Shamma is former Professor of Literature and Migration Studies, an award-winning researcher and writer, and --generally speaking-- a citizen of the word and the world in its myriad compositions. She is now completing a trade book on migration and its embedded pursuits of home. When We Talk about Home (forthcoming with New Press) will be her fifth book publication, and is unique in integrating a decade of research within refugee camps and asylum centers into a public-facing consideration of what home means to those who have lost it. The research that went into making When We Talk about Home was awarded fellowships and grants by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, and the book project itself won the PEN/America Jean Stein Oral History Prize, for offering "compelling prose" which "insists that migration crises can have never-ending and multi-generational consequences."
Dr Shamma is also the author of over two-dozen peer-reviewed articles and interviews. 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,PN Review, and various other publications. Her previous books include Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2018), Joe Brainard's Art (editor, Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Migration Culture and Identity (Palgrave, 2023), and the carefully curated and expansive Conversations with the New York School (EUP, 2025). In terms of literary criticism she is also completing Forms of Displacement, which attends to the shapes conversations around displacement take in literary forms.
Dr Shamma was the principal curator of a digital archive on migration which was awarded a British Academy grant, and following this work she was also 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 of the Network for New York School Studies , which was awarded a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She continues to serve as peer-reviewer and judge for various international award agencies, an expert speaker on the BBC (TV and Radio), a reviewer for academic university publishers, and a speaker on contemporary poetry and or refugee and migration studies at international conferences throughout the US, UK, and Europe.
She was awarded her PhD from the University of Oxford, and her MA from Georgetown University. Along the way she also held fellowships at Durham University, Yale University and Emory University. She continues to write and think about American poetry, while focusing mostly these days on the ways in which the displaced cultivate cures for the ache for home, living gratefully in newly reclaimed senses of home with her family.
For all writing enquiries please contact Nour Sallam ([email protected]). For speaking engagements please contact her here.
