For over 50 years, the Writers Series program at St. Lawrence University has welcomed all varieties of authors, including Pulitzer Prize winners. Join us as we welcome the 2026-27 Viebranz Visiting Professor Samiya Bashir. The event is free and open to the public.
Samiya Bashir
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. Samiya’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature plus 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. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, including Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Her fourth collection, I Hope this Helps, was released to wide acclaim from Nightboat Books in 2025. She is the 2026-27 Viebranz Visiting Professor.
Photo by Jes Neal.