Samiya Bashir, called a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” by Diego Báez, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poet whose solo and collaborative work 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 Oregon Book Award. Her fourth collection, I Hope This Helps, is forthcoming in Spring 2025. Samiya’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, New York Council for the Arts and Oregon’s Regional Arts & Culture Council fellowships, among numerous other awards, grants, and residencies. A sought-after editor, and author’s coach, Bashir most recently served as Associate Professor at Reed College, and executive director of Lambda Literary. Currently the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, Bashir lives in Harlem, NYC.

What is a thing of beauty
if not us?

— from “Field Theories,” Pushcart Prize-winning title poem of Field Theories (2017)