For her post-secondary education, Samatar studied at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana.[1] She graduated from the institution in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. In 1997, Samatar earned a Master's degree in African languages and literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. She subsequently completed a Ph.D. in 2013 at the institution in the same field, with a specialization in contemporary Arabic literature.[5] She wrote her dissertation on the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih.[6]