Samiya Bashir holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories (Nightboat Books, 2017), winner of the Oregon Book Awards' 2018 Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. She is also the co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana.
Of her poetry, poet Marcella Dyrand writes, "Samiya Bashir challenges the vocabulary of science, finding inflections and echoes within that vocabulary of the long and brutal history of race and racially based economic exploitation in the U.S.A."
Bashir is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Astraea Foundation, Cave Canem, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National League of American Pen Women, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, among others. In 2019, Bashir was awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She has collaborated with visual and media artists on various projects throughout her career, including projects with video artist Roland Dahwen Wu and dancer Kenyon Gaskin. Bashir will be the Poem-a-Day Guest Editor in June 2019, and is an associate professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where she lives.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Field Theories (Nightboat Books, 2017)
Gospel (RedBone Press, 2009)
Where the Apple Falls (RedBone Press, 2005)
