Samiya Bashir is a poet, artist, writer, performer, educator, and advocate. She is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories (Nightboat, 2017), winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Awards Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Her other books of poetry are Gospel (Redbone, 2009), and Where the Apple Falls (Redbone, 2005). Her next book, I Hope this Helps, is forthcoming in Spring 2025 from Nightboat Books. Samiya’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature. She currently serves as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University and lives in Harlem.