Clarisse Baleja Saïdi (b. Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire) is a writer, editor and educator of Rwandan and Congolese (DRC) descent and Ugandan and Canadian dual nationality. A Pan-African and a migratory artist, her work crosses and questions borders and boundaries. She’s lived in Abidjan and Bouaké, in Tunis, in Ottawa, Montréal, Toronto, in Dar es Salaam, Lisboa, Boston and more. The daughter of a translator and an economist, she writes of home(s) and faithfulness, of unsettlement and resettlement, and of personal, political, psycholinguistic and psychospiritual belongings.

Baleja holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is a three-time MacDowell fellow, a two-time Yaddo fellow and the recipient of grants from the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. Her writing was awarded the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize, a Marina Nemat Creative Writing Prize, and the Penguin Random House’s Short Story Prize among other honors, and in 2022-2023, she was named the Richard McCann Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Currently, she is at work on a novel, a collection of essays, and other creative projects. Her short form is published in The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and Harvard’s Transition Magazine. She’s taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan and at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Baleja serves as a style editor at the literary journal BRICK and as a manuscript consultant.