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I Hope This Helps: Samiya Bashir in Residence

Fri, January 17, 2025 - Wed, January 22, 2025 at Multiple

We are thrilled to welcome Samiya Bashir for nearly a week of community and campus based events. Please save the dates and stay tuned for more details!

Our deep gratitude to the MSU Office for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, MSU African American and African Studies (AIIS), MSU Creative Writing Program, and the Residential College in the Arts & Humanities for their support of this residency.

All Events Free and Open to the Public Unless Otherwise Noted

Click here to view/download flyer

 

  • Friday, January 17, 3:00 - 4:00 p.m., Wells Hall, 619 Red Cedar Rd., MSU Campus
    • machine of perpetual motion: Samiya Bashir (A Creative Writing Community event)
      • Join the MSU Creative Writing Community for this conversation with Bashir about her life's practice as an interdisciplinary maker.

  • Sunday, January 19, 12:00-1:30 p.m., Capital Area District Library (CADL) Downtown Branch, 401 S. Capitol Ave., Lansing
In 1991, June Jordan established the Poetry for the People Workshop in the African American Studies Department at University of California-Berkeley. The workshop had three guiding prinicples: That students will not take themselves seriously unless we who teach them honor and respect them in every practical way that we can; that words can change the world and save our lives; and that poetry is the highest art and the most exacting service devoted to our most serious and our most imaginative deployment of verbs and nouns on behalf of whatever and whoever we cherish. The workshops were accessible and welcoming to writers at all levels, and, at the close of each semester, students produced an anthology of poetry and showcased their work at community and on-campus public poetry readings. Although Jordan died in 2002, PFTP continues to this day at Berkeley and at numerous colleges and universities across the country. Samiya Bashir, an alum of the program under June Jordan, will lead this generative poetry workshop and share its model to empower local poets to establish their own.


  • Monday, January 20, 6:00-7:30 p.m., LookOut Gallery, Snyder-Phillips Hall 361 Physics Rd., MSU Campus
    • Opening reception, Emerging Visions, featuring I Hope This Helps by Samiya Bashir, and photography by Darryl DeAngelo Terrell

  • Tuesday, January 21, 7:00 p.m., The Robin Theatre, 1101 S. Washington Ave., Lansing
 
  • Wednesday, January 22, 7:00 p.m., RCAH Theater, Snyder-Phillips Hall, 361 Physics Rd., MSU Campus
    • I Hope This Helps: Samiya Bashir Reading/Presentation
    • Reception/Book signing to follow in LookOut Gallery, Snyder-Phillips Hall

 

About Samiya Bashir

Samiya Bashir leans forward looking into camera.

Samiya Bashir, called a "dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion," by Diego Báez, writing for Booklist, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, 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 variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award's Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry.

Her fourth collection, I Hope this Helps, is forthcoming 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, plus numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies including MacDowell, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the New York Council on the Arts. 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.

Formerly Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Bashir worked to create, employ, and teach—both within and outside of traditional academic settings—a restorative poetics which can acknowledge the despair often bred by isolation and turn it toward a poetics of light and its potential for witness, for healing, and for change. More recently, Bashir lead Lambda Literary through a year of growth, opportunity, and increased visibility and engagement, bringing its essential programming back in-person across the country.

She currently serves as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, Bashir lives in Harlem.