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Samiya Bashir
Summary
Samiya A. Bashir is an American lesbian poet and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently associate professor of creative writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Bashir moved to Los Angeles where she became involved in theatre, before pursuing a career in writing. She attended the University of California and became the institution's poet laureate in 1994. After leaving California and moving east, Bashir worked in magazine publishing and briefly taught high school. After moving to New York City in 1997, she continued to write poetry and essays, publishing three full-length collections of poetry.
Samiya Bashir was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her mother Pamela Adelle Hilliard, an African-American woman from Detroit, and her father Abdirahman Mohammed Bashir, a first generation Somali immigrant, met at Eastern Michigan University. Samiya is the eldest of six children, and became an avid writer at a young age. She later attributed some of her academic interests to the influences of her parents, Bashir's father taught science and math, while her mother taught language arts.
She moved to Los Angeles at the age of 19, where she took college classes and explored performance and theatre. It was during this time that she became actively involved in the local LGBT community, working first for the local radio station KWKW-LA and then for the Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Inspired by the work of June Jordan and Toni Morrison, Bashir decided to focus on writing, and moved to the Bay Area after the 1992 riots. She transferred to the University of California, Berkeley where she studied and taught as part of Jordan's Poetry for the People program. Bashir graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in the Literature of American Ethnic Cultures from Berkeley in 1994. She was named poet laureate of the nine campuses of University of California that same year.
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