Dr Yasmine Shamma is a writer, researcher, and leader in education. Having attained the rank of full professor, she is now completing writing a trade book on migration and its embedded pursuits of home, which integrates a decade of research within refugee camps and asylum centers into its study. This forthcoming work has been awarded prizes from international bodies including the Leverhulme Trust, and the British Academy. When We Talk about Home was also announced the winner of 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." It is forthcoming with New Press.
Dr Shamma is also the author of over a 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, and PN Review, and other publications. Her academic books include Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry (OUP, 2018), Joe Brainard's Art (editor, EUP, 2019), Migration Culture and Identity (Palgrave, 2023), and the carefully curated Conversations with the New York School (EUP, 2025). She is currently completing a monograph, Forms of Displacement, which attends to the shapes conversations around displacement take in literary forms, alongside the aforementioned Broken Arabic, a creative non-fiction trade book on what refugees and the displaced make of "home" when it is lost.
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 also delivers invited key note speeches to international conferences from the US to Europe.
In her spare time she organises writing and reading workshops for the displaced, cultivating both literacy and expression, in efforts to offer space for the processing of the trauma of displacement in art, pursing the possibility of cultivating refuge in writing.
She was awarded her PhD from the University of Oxford over a decade ago and has 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.
For all writing enquiries please contact Kesia Lupo ([email protected]). For speaking engagements please contact here.
