:: For literary/publication inquiries, please contact Kelsey Day @ The Aragi Agency :: 📬 || ☎️ || 🖥️
:: For bookings, readings, workshops, and more, please contact Leslie Shipman @ The Shipman Agency :: 📬 || ☎️ || 🖥️
:: For reprint permissions, publicity, translation requests, please contact: Nightboat Books :: 📬 || 🖥️
:: BIO ::
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.
Her fourth collection, I Hope this Helps, is forthcoming Spring 2025 from Nightboat Books.
Samiya’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, plus numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies including MacDowell, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the New York Council on the Arts. 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.
She currently serves as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, Bashir lives / on the road / in Harlem.
A gifted writing coach and sought-after editor, I’ll bring over two decades of experience to your process and project. Working with me will get you closer to your dreams of authorship while ensuring that your manuscript is the best version of itself possible.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT MY SERVICES HERE!
CLICK HERE to Schedule your FREE CONSULTATION today!
