An editor, writer, and communications consultant for nonprofit and arts organizations, Samiya Bashir earned a BA in the literature of American ethnic cultures from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1994. Her full-length collections of poetry include Where the Apple Falls: poems (2005) and Gospel: poems (2009); she is also the author of the chapbooks Wearing Shorts on the First Day of Spring (1999), American Visa (2001), and Teasing Crow (2006).
 
The poems in Gospel reference a diverse range of voices and traditions; Norse gods, Ghanaian call and response, and black gospel all contribute to an exploration of the sensual world. Blackademics reviewer Alexis Pauline Gumbs found the poems “inhabiting the tradition of black gospel music’s straddling contradiction, standing in the sacred and profane.” Gumbs further noted that the collection presents a “close look at the infinite places and moments when the human body meets despair, pleasure and transcendence.”
 
Bashir is the editor of Best Black Women’s Erotica 2 (2003) and co-editor, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana, of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (2002).
 
Bashir was the recipient of a Poetry Award from the Astraea Lesbian Foundation. Where the Apple Falls: poems was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies War Diaries, Best Lesbian Poetry, Best of Best Lesbian Erotica, and the Cave Canem Tenth Anniversary Anthology. A Cave Canem Scholar, Bashir is also a founding member of Fire & Ink, a writers’ festival for LGBT writers of African descent.