Siaara Freeman is from Cleveland, Ohio, where she is the current Poet Laureate for Cleveland Heights and University Heights, she is also the unofficial Lake Erie Siren.
Siaara Freeman is from Cleveland, Ohio, where she is the current Poet Laureate for Cleveland Heights and University Heights, she is also the unofficial Lake Erie Siren. She is a 2023 Room in the House fellow with Karamu Theater and 2022 Catapult fellow with Cleveland Public Theater, as well as a 2021 Premier Playwright fellow recipient with CPT. In 2021, Siaara filmed a commercial for the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is a 2020 Watering Hole Manuscript fellow, 2018 Poetry Foundation incubator fellow, and four-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in The Journal,Josephine Quarterly, Cleveland Magazine, and elsewhere. She has had multiple poems go viral and has toured both nationally and internationally. Siaara’s first full-length poetry collection Urbanshee is available from Button Poetry, which won a 2023 Silver Award for the Benjamin Franklin IPBA Award for Poetry and qualified as a 2023 finalist for the Audre Lorde Award with The Publishing Triangle. When Siaara is not working, she is likely by a lake, thinking of Toni Morrison & talking to ghosts. She is growing her Afro so tall, God uses it as a microphone and speaks through her.
