2025 Summer Workshop Program

Samiya Bashir Beyond the Page: Experimenting with Multimedia Poetries August 10 to August 15, 2025 Time 9 am - 12 pm Discipline: Poetry Open To All On-site Housing NOT Available - Off-site Housing Options

You will make something that astounds you. A poem.

Likely you will begin a few pieces that will succeed and fail in your own determination of them. This process will get you closer to the poem or body of work that lay just at the edge of your imagining. Walk questioning into our gatherings around in the morning; leave questioning again, hungry for more, at lunchtime. This workshop is one of inquiry and discovery through the practice of multimedia poetries—to include audio, visual, digital, hand-made, etc. We’ll examine the landscape and ask how these poems and poetries work, how and where they succeed or fail, and how they might move us through our own experimentation. We’ll consider the work of others, including our peers’ work-in-progress. In order to discover our own processes and lyrical facility with multiple media, a great deal of trial-and-error will need undertaking. We’ll work our way through synchronous and asynchronous exercises. We’ll split our time between conversation + craft talk + laboratory + presentation + critical response. We will engage with arts resources and events around our area.

Please think about which mediums call to you most directly and bring whatever equipment you need to work within and across that medium.

Biography

Samiya Bashir is a multi-media poet, writer, librettist, and artist whose solo and collaborative work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, exhibited, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome, and across the United States. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Her fourth collection, I Hope This Helps, is forthcoming in spring 2025. Bashir lives in Harlem, NYC.