Samiya Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories (Nightboat, 2017), winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Awards Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Her other books of poetry are Gospel (Redbone Press, 2009), and Where the Apple Falls (Redbone Press, 2005). Her next book, I Hope This Helps, is forthcoming in Spring 2025 from Nightboat Books.
She is the editor of Black Women’s Erotica and co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana. She has collaborated with visual and media artists on numerous projects, including the limited-edition artists’ book, Hades D.W.P., with artists Alison Saar and Tracy Schlapp. Her work has also been included in numerous anthologies, including There’s A Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman, and Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, edited by Michael Walsh. Her most recent multi-media project is “I Hope This Helps” at the Africa Center in Harlem, a multi-sensory exhibition exploring critical issues impacting and reflecting the human condition.
Samiya’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, and 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, Samiya 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 writers’ festival for LGBT writers of African descent, with whom she worked through 2015.