Yasmin Mariam Kloth
Hello Friends—
My name is Yasmin Mariam Kloth and I love poetry—to read it, to write it, to stack it on my bedside table, to let it fill my dreams while I sleep. I have been keeping journals and scribbling lines of poetry since I was eight years old.
I am a poet based in Cincinnati, OH. My writing often scratches at the surface of love, loss, place, and space, with a focus on exploring my Middle Eastern heritage. Although I have been writing since I was a little girl, my poetry has really just found its way in the world over the past four years.
My poems have appeared in literary outlets such as JuxtaProse, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, the Whale Road Review, West Trestle Review, and the Cathexis Northwest Press, among others. My work has also appeared in the Rockvale Review, where I served as a poetry reviewer in 2020. Much to my surprise, my poem “Banyan Song,” originally published in the Tiger Moth Review about my grandmother’s emigration from Cairo to Montreal, took third place in the 2021 Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian poetry.
In August 2022, my debut collection of poems, Ancestry Unfinished: Poems of a Lost Generation, was published by Kelsay Books; the collection pulls the thread of my family’s Middle Eastern origins through the generations of women who shaped my story. When I’m not writing, you can find me with my husband and young daughter, often outdoors on any number of local hiking trails.
Yasmin Mariam Kloth 