Samiya Bashir - portrait

Samiya Bashir

Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, a gift of the Drue Heinz Trust
September 9, 2019–April 3, 2020
Profession
Associate Professor, Creative Writing Program, Department of English, Reed College
Project title
MAPS :: a cartography in progress
Project description

What does it mean to simultaneously create and be created? MAPS :: a cartography in progress explores these questions as well as the interrogative cilia which burst from their branches. This work reflects our current moment forward to the next generation and back through those who brought us safely forth. Engaging questions of diaspora and movement, wrestling with my own familial history and the interlocking cultural and geographic threads of Motown, Mogadishu, and Rome, I am working to write and build a multimedia poetry, steeped in East African diaspora, which can be reshaped like culture to stretch across multiple platforms, a house made of poetry which can be moved and carried.