Siaara Freeman is a poet, playwright, and educator from Cleveland, Ohio, where she serves as the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Cleveland Heights and University Heights. She is also the self-proclaimed “Unofficial Lake Erie Siren.”
Her honors include the 2023 Room in the House Fellowship with Karamu House, the 2022 Catapult Fellowship and the 2021 Premier Playwright Fellowship with Cleveland Public Theatre, the 2020 Watering Hole Manuscript Fellowship, and the 2018 Poetry Foundation Incubator Fellowship. She is also a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee. In 2021, she appeared in a commercial for the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Siaara’s work has appeared in The Journal, Josephine Quarterly, Cleveland Magazine, and other publications. Her poems have reached millions online, and she has performed across the United States and internationally.
Her debut full-length collection, Urbanshee (Button Poetry), was a finalist for the 2023 Audre Lorde Award presented by The Publishing Triangle and received a 2023 Silver Benjamin Franklin Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) Award for Poetry.
As an educator, Siaara has taught middle school theater, creative writing, and social-emotional learning (SEL), and serves as Programs Director for Sparrow’s Fortune, where she develops arts programming that centers storytelling, community, and joy.
When she’s not writing or teaching, you’ll likely find her beside Lake Erie, thinking about Toni Morrison and talking to ghosts. She’s currently growing her Afro so tall that God uses it as a microphone to speak through her.
