Exploring work from her solo multimedia exhibitions featuring multi-sensory poetic installations and her forthcoming new book, I HOPE THIS HELPS (Nightboat Books, Spring 2025), Samiya Bashir will read, perform, and screen selections of the work and engage in dialogue about the pursuit of a restorative poetics which, through both process and product, might open up new paths from isolation toward revivification and healing. Drawing on her vast background as an organizer, award-winning artist and poet, scholar and teacher and a student of June Jordan’s, Bashir will bring together shared experiences of upheaval, displacement, and the relentless pursuit of hope amidst uncertainty.

About the Speaker

Samiya Bashir is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poet whose solo and collaborative work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, awarded 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 light. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Other 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. In addition to her books, Bashir 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 writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent with whom she worked through 2015. A sought-after editor, Bashir most recently served as Associate Professor at Reed College, and executive director of Lambda Literary. She currently serves as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University.