Samiya Bashir

Born in Ypsilanti and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Bashir earned a BA in Literature of American Ethnic Cultures from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. She began publishing poetry and chapbooks in the 1990s before releasing her first full-length collection, Where the Apple Falls, in 2005.

Her poetry collections include Where the Apple Falls (2005), Gospel (2009), and Field Theories (2017). Where the Apple Falls was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry, while Gospel was a finalist in the same category in 2010. Field Theories won the 2018 Oregon Book Awards' Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry, and its title poem received a Pushcart Prize.

Bashir co-founded Fire & Ink in 2002, an organization and writers' festival created to support LGBTQ+ writers of African descent. She remained involved with the organization through 2015. In 2022, she became executive director of Lambda Literary, serving until 2023.

Her work extends beyond poetry into editing, performance, multimedia art, and opera. She co-edited Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, edited Black Women's Erotica 2, and wrote the libretto for Cook Shack, an opera by composer Del'Shawn Taylor that was commissioned and premiered by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2023.

Bashir was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature in 2019. Her fourth poetry collection, I Hope This Helps, was published by Nightboat Books in May 2025. She lives in Harlem and continues to work across poetry, performance, multimedia art, teaching, and literary advocacy. For 2026–27, she is serving as the Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University.