Help us welcome our 2025-2026 visiting professors, poet Samiya Bashir and fiction writer Kristen Roupenian who will both read from recent works.
About Samiya:
Described by Booklist’s Diego Báez as “a dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” Samiya Bashir is a poet, librettist, performer, and multimedia artist whose work has been widely published, exhibited, and staged across the United States and internationally, from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome.
Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of four poetry collections, including Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Her fourth collection, I Hope This Helps, which Jericho Brown called “Bashir’s magnum opus,” was released in Spring 2025 by Nightboat Books.
Bashir’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, the Oregon Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, and fellowships or residencies from MacDowell, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the New York Council on the Arts, among many others. Her editorial work includes national magazines and anthologies of literature and visual art. In 2002, she co-founded Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and festival supporting LGBTQ+ writers of African descent and led its work through 2015. Bashir is currently reigniting Fire & Inkwell, a movement dedicated to supporting the lives and work of LGBTQ+ artists and writers of African descent and heritage.
Most recently, she served as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, prior to which she taught at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, ran the poetry program as Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College, and led Lambda Literary through a year of renewed growth and national in-person programming. She lives—when not on the road—in Harlem.
About Kristen:
Kristen Roupenian holds a PhD in English from Harvard, an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and a BA from Barnard College. She is the author of the short story, “Cat Person,” which was published in The New Yorker and selected by Sheila Heti for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018. She is at work on a novel. Follow her on Instagram @KRoupenian.
About Samiya:
Described by Booklist’s Diego Báez as “a dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” Samiya Bashir is a poet, librettist, performer, and multimedia artist whose work has been widely published, exhibited, and staged across the United States and internationally, from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome.
Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of four poetry collections, including Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Her fourth collection, I Hope This Helps, which Jericho Brown called “Bashir’s magnum opus,” was released in Spring 2025 by Nightboat Books.
Bashir’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, the Oregon Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, and fellowships or residencies from MacDowell, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the New York Council on the Arts, among many others. Her editorial work includes national magazines and anthologies of literature and visual art. In 2002, she co-founded Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and festival supporting LGBTQ+ writers of African descent and led its work through 2015. Bashir is currently reigniting Fire & Inkwell, a movement dedicated to supporting the lives and work of LGBTQ+ artists and writers of African descent and heritage.
Most recently, she served as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, prior to which she taught at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, ran the poetry program as Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College, and led Lambda Literary through a year of renewed growth and national in-person programming. She lives—when not on the road—in Harlem.
About Kristen:
Kristen Roupenian holds a PhD in English from Harvard, an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and a BA from Barnard College. She is the author of the short story, “Cat Person,” which was published in The New Yorker and selected by Sheila Heti for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018. She is at work on a novel. Follow her on Instagram @KRoupenian.
| Building: | Angell Hall |
|---|---|
| Event Type: | Performance |
| Tags: | Author, Contemporary Literature, Creative Writing, Department Of English Language And Literature, English Language And Literature, Free, Graduate, Literature, Mfa Program In Creative Writing, Rackham, The Helen Zell Writers' Program, Writing |
| Source: | Happening @ Michigan from University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program, Residential College, English Language & Literature - MFA Program in Creative Writing, University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), Department of English Language and Literature |
