Samiya Bashir

Biography

Samiya Bashir was born in 1970 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. A professor and lesbian poet, she is the author of poetry chapbooks Wearing Shorts on the First Day of Spring _(1999), _American Visa _(2001), and _Teasing Crow (2006). Her full-length collections include Where the Apple Falls (2005); Gospel (2009), a Lambda Literary Award finalist; and _Field Theories _(2017), which won the Oregon Book Award. As an activist, her work focuses on civil rights struggles and engages multiple landscapes of her own queer identity and politics. Bashir attended the University of California, Berkeley, in 1994, where she received her bachelor’s in literature of American ethnic cultures and served as poet laureate. In 2011, she studied at Poetry for the People, an arts/activism program founded by June Jordan at the University of Michigan. She was the first Black woman to be awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome in 2019. She joined the Reed College faculty in 2012, where she previously taught creative writing.

Birth Date

1970-01-01

Place of Birth

Somali, American, African American

Country of Nationality

Somalia

Languages Spoken

English, Spanish, Italian

University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Poetry Collections

Wearing Shorts on the First Day of Spring (Sistafire Publishing, self-published,1999); American Visa (Sistafire Publishing, self-published, 2001); Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (Chicago, IL, Third World Press, 2002); Best Black Women's Erotica II (Jersey City, NJ, Cleis Press, 2003) ;Teasing Crow (Sistafire Publishing, self-published, 2006); Where the Apple Falls (RedBone Press, New Orleans, LA, 2005); Gospel (RedBone Press, New Orleans, LA, 2009); Field Theories (2017) Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, NY

Sources

Hawley, John Charles. LGBTQ America Today: An Encyclopedia. Greenwood, 2009.
 
"Poetry for the People.” African American & African Diaspora Studies, https://africam.berkeley.edu/poetry-for-the-people/. Accessed 28 January 2022.
 
"Samiya Bashir." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/samiya-bashir. Accessed 28 January 2022.
 
"Samiya Bashir." Poets.org, https://poets.org/poet/samiya-bashir. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.
 
"Samiya Bashir." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 September 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samiya_Bashir. Accessed 14 October 2024.
 
"Samiya Bashir." Gertrude Press, www.gertrudepress.org/samiya-bashir.html. Accessed 28 January 2022.