About
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.
