Born in Montreal, Quebec to parents who had emigrated from Chernobyl,[1] Yelin was an alumna of Macdonald College, from which she graduated in 1932; she then studied at Columbia Union Teachers College before completing an MA at the University of Montreal in 1961.
At varying times during her career she taught students at every level, from early childhood to university.
As a writer Yelin won a number of awards for her work, which reflected her experiences growing up in Montreal's Jewish community and the yiddishkeit by which she had been surrounded from childhood.
Her poetry collection Seeded in Sinai was published in 1975; other works include Shulamis: Stories from a Montreal Childhood (1983) and Au soleil de ma nuit (1985).
[1] She suffered for much of her career from mental illness, a condition documented in the book Demonic to Divine: The Double Life of Shulamis Yelin, which was published in 2014.