Samiya Bashir, called a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” by Diego Báez, writing for Booklist, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome and across the United States.

Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry.

Samiya’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, and two Michigan’s Hopwood Poetry Awards among numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies. In addition to her books, Bashir has served as editor to national magazines and anthologies of literature and artwork. In 2002 she was co-founder of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent with whom she worked through 2015.

“How, Bashir asks often in her poems in all their various forms, can we exist today,” wrote Marcella Durand for Hyperallergic, “in this place, in this time, as who we are?”

Formerly Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Bashir worked to create, employ, and teach—both within and outside of traditional academic settings—a restorative poetics which can acknowledge the despair often bred by isolation and turn it toward a poetics of light and its potential for witness, for healing, and for change. More recently, Bashir lead Lambda Literary through a year of growth, opportunity, and increased visibility and engagement, bringing its essential programming back in-person across the country. 

Currently the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, Bashir lives on the road in Harlem.

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