Samiya Bashir

Samiya Bashir (she/her/nem) is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multimedia poetry maker. Described as a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion” by Diego Báez in Booklist, Bashir is the author of multiple poetry collections, including Field Theories (Nightboat Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Awards Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry.

Her honors include a Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Regional Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, and two Michigan Hopwood Poetry Awards. Bashir has edited magazines and anthologies of literature and artwork. In 2002, she cofounded Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBTQ+ writers of African descent, with which she worked through 2015.

Both within and beyond traditional academic settings, Bashir works to create, employ, and teach a restorative poetics that can acknowledge the despair often bred by isolation, and turn it toward a poetics of light and its potential for witness, healing, and change. Formerly an associate professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Bashir served as executive director of Lambda Literary from 2022 to 2023. She lives in Harlem.