Samiya Bashir

Samiya Bashir was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her mother Pamela Adelle Hilliard, an African-American woman from Detroit, and her father Abdirahman Mohammed Bashir, a first generation Somali immigrant, met at Eastern Michigan University.[1] Samiya is the eldest of six children, and became an avid writer at a young age. She later attributed some of her academic interests to the influences of her parents, Bashir's father taught science and math, while her mother taught language arts.[2]

She moved to Los Angeles at the age of 19, where she took college classes and explored performance and theatre. It was during this time that she became actively involved in the local LGBT community, working first for the local radio station KWKW-LA and then for the Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Inspired by the work of June Jordan and Toni Morrison,[3] Bashir decided to focus on writing, and moved to the Bay Area after the 1992 riots.[4][5] She transferred to the University of California, Berkeley where she studied and taught as part of Jordan's Poetry for the People program.[6] Bashir graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in the Literature of American Ethnic Cultures from Berkeley in 1994. She was named poet laureate of the nine campuses of University of California that same year.[7] She graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with a Master of Fine Arts in 2011.

After Berkeley, Bashir wrote and performed poetry in the Bay Area. In 1995, Bashir helped found The Black Girl Collective with other black lesbian and bisexual artists. In 1996, Bashir took the winnings from an SF Guardian Poetry Award and moved east. She briefly taught at Hot Springs High School in Arkansas before moving to New York City in 1997.

Bashir worked as an editor and writer for various publications such as Ms. Magazine, Black Issues Book Review, and Curve.[5] During that period, Bashir published poetry, articles, essays and editorials in publications such as Poetry, Callaloo, Essence Magazine, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Vibe, Seventeen, XXL, the American Journal of Public Health, and The Encyclopedia Project.

In 1999, she published her first chapbook, Wearing Shorts on the First Day of Spring. Her second chapbook American Visa was published in 2001.[8] In 2002 Bashir became a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, a writers festival for LGBT writers of African descent.[9] In addition, Bashir is an alumni fellow of Cave Canem,[10] and has served on numerous boards of directors including the National Black Justice Coalition and NY Black Pride.[11]

Bashir co-edited Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Art & Literature (2002) with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana.[12] She wrote "June Jordan: A critical biography" which was included in Greenwood Press' Contemporary American Women Poets: An A-to-Z Guide (2003).

She published her debut poetry collection, Where the Apple Falls, in 2005. This collection focused on womanhood, and the intersection of femininity, sexuality, seasons and the cycle of life and death.[13] In 2006, she published her third chapbook, Teasing Crow & Other Haiku.

Bashir's second full-length poetry collection Gospel was published in 2009. The sequence of Gospel was based on Ghanaian call and response sequences in music,[14] and the poems were inspired by Norse mythology and traditional gospel music.[15] Both Where the Apple Falls and Gospel were nominated for Lambda Literary Awards.

From 2011 to 2012, Bashir was a lecturer at the University of Michigan. In 2012, she began teaching Creative Writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where she is associate professor of Creative Writing.[4] For the month of June 2019, Bashir was Poem-a-Day Guest Editor for the Academy of American Poets.[16] In September 2022 Bashir was named executive director of Lambda Literary, an LGBTQ writers organization.[17]

• Field Theories. New York: Nightboat Books. 2017.
• Gospel: Poems. Washington, D.C.: RedBone Press. 2009.
• Where the Apple Falls: Poems. Washington, D.C.: RedBone Press. 2005.

• Teasing Crow & Other Haiku. 2006.
• Evans, Mari (2001). American Visa. New York: SistaFire Publishing.
• Wearing Shorts on the First Day of Spring. 1999.

• Pushcart Prize XLIII: Best of the Small Presses. Wainscott, New York: Pushcart Press. 2019.
• Nepantla: an anthology for queer poets of color. New York: Nightboat Books. 2018.
• Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. 2018.
• Bettering American Poetry 2015. Bettering Books. 2017.
• Flicker and Spark: A Contemporary Queer Anthology. Lowbrow Press. 2013.
• War Diaries. Los Angeles: AIDS Project Los Angeles. 2010.
• Voices Rising: celebrating 20 years of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender writing. Washington, D.C.: RedBone Press. 2007.
• Cave Canem Tenth Anniversary Anthology. Cave Canem. 2006.
• Best Lesbian Erotica 03. San Francisco: Cleis Press. 2006.
• (as editor) Best Black Women's Erotica 2, 1st ed. San Francisco: Cleis Press. 2003.
• Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica. San Francisco: Cleis Press. 2000.
• (as editor) Medina, Tony; Lansana, Quraysh Ali (2002). Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Art & Literature. Chicago: Third World Press.