Yasmine Bolden

Yasmine Bolden is a Baltimore-based poet, educator, and descendant of Black/Nahiłií women who heard the earth speaking to them through their gardens and lovingly spoke back. Through their writing, they explore queer syncretisms in Afrodiasporic faiths, love and kinship in the human and beyond-human world, and a poetics shaped by Black trans sapphisms on haunted land. Bolden’s work has been planted in ONLY POEMS, Black Earth Institute, West Trade Review, Alocasia: 99 Queer Writers on Plants & Nature, 250 Project: A Black & Indigenous Reckoning, and Rootwork Journal, among other text-based gardens. As an undergraduate studying Writing Seminars and Africana Studies, they co-founded Bluejays & Poets, Johns Hopkins University’s first poetry and performance organization built on Black and Indigenous storytelling traditions, as well as Linked Hearts, a transnational virtual poetry reading series exploring Queer, Indigenous, and diasporic poetics in service of grassroots mutual aid. Who I Love Marks Time In My Bones, their forthcoming hybrid chapbook, won Garden Party Collective’s 2026 Chapbook Contest and was a finalist for Purple Ink Press’ Beloved Prize.