A Client Chat with Samiya Bashir

Shipman Agency staffer and Starboard editor Kira Tucker spoke with Samiya Bashir about her latest book, I Hope This Helps, out May 13 from Nightboat Books. Read below as Samiya explores the making of her “magnum opus” (Jericho Brown) and much more.

Kira Tucker: I Hope This Helps—the book and the art exhibition—is a multimedia mix of visual art, sound, and text—from libretti to sculpture, erasure to cinepoetry, and more. How does being so “genre queer” impact your work?

Samiya Bashir: Being “genre queer,” as I call it, isn’t an aesthetic choice—it’s a survival strategy. It’s how I breathe inside the constraints that are always trying to hem us in. Formally, it’s a refusal. Spiritually, it’s a homecoming. Some stories want to be sung. Some want to be walked through. Some want to bleed through the page, or the wall, or your headphones. Who am I to tell a poem how to show up? My job is to listen. To honor what it asks for. To not flatten it just because it doesn’t fit neatly on a shelf. That’s how I ended up with a book that’s also an installation that’s also a chorus that’s also a map. That’s what Black life has taught me: we’re never just one thing. We never were.

KT: How did you decide on the title?

SB: I Hope This Helps came before the poems. Before the structure. Before I even admitted I was writing a book. It showed up like a pulse—steady, soft, persistent. And I listened. It wasn’t trying to be clever. It wasn’t trying to impress anybody. And in that moment, it felt like the truest thing I could say.

I hope this helps. It’s tired and tender at the same time. It’s not “Here’s the answer.” It’s “Here’s what I’ve got.” Which is how I’ve survived—by offering what I can, when I can, and trusting that it might reach somebody. It’s also what I hear in the lineage of Black women who raised me. Who never stopped trying to help, even when the world didn’t deserve them.

You write, “I’m reminded how much this whole business of writing, of sharing, is just not about me, and for good reason.” How has this work been both a personal and communal undertaking?

I often write alone, but I never write for myself. I write because someone once wrote something that reached into my chest and rearranged me. I write because someone might need this breath the way I once did. I Hope This Helps was born out of rupture—personal, political, ecological—and what kept me going wasn’t the dream of some solitary genius moment. It was the memory of people I love. Of poems that saved me. Of voices I carry in my blood. I’m just one node in the chorus. The offering may be mine, but the purpose is ours.

Your poems traverse geographies, histories, and the infinite dimensions of Blackness. Can you describe your process of mapping this project, literally and figuratively?

I mapped the book like a body—pulse first–geography came along for the ride. I moved through Italy, New York, Massachusetts, Detroit—but more than place, I was moving through memory. Through grief. Through the haunt. Some work was first sketched on airplane napkins. Some was pulled from the middle of a dream. Some had to be walked out of my bones.

There’s a reason Derrais Carter called me a poet-cartographer. I track breath, movement, ritual. I trace the fault lines. And then I build. I’m not interested in maps that promise to lead you to safety. I’m interested in maps that teach you how to survive despite unknown terrain.

You write, “I think how it’s always a surprise to find myself exactly where I’m supposed to be. How our lives insist on small miracles despite us.” What else surprised you in the making of this work? What were you surprised to learn?

I was surprised by how much tenderness I still had in me. I was writing from deep exhaustion—spiritual, emotional, financial—and still, these soft moments kept showing up. Humor. Love. Desire. All these things I wasn’t sure I still had access to. They just kept appearing, like: Don’t forget us. We’re part of your survival, too. I was also surprised by how hard it was to let myself be fully visible. Not polished. Not curated. But present. That level of honesty required me to burn some things down. But it also let me breathe.

Much of I Hope This Helps was written during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. What is it like publishing it now, in 2025?

Strange. Tender. Necessary. When I was writing this book, I didn’t know if anyone would be here to read it. Including me. So publishing it now feels both like a miracle and a reckoning. People keep calling this a “post-pandemic” world, but most of us know better. The grief still walks among us. Our breath is still shallow. But what I also see is that people are hungrier than ever for work that holds something real. That doesn’t flinch. That doesn’t pretend it doesn’t hurt. I didn’t write this book to be timely. I wrote it because I needed it. I still do.

Terrance Hayes writes that your work is “a lantern of language for surviving dark times.” The Africa Center, where your exhibition was on display last summer, praises your work for evoking “the relentless pursuit of hope amidst uncertainty.” What do you hope is carried forward from this book?

I hope they carry the permission to feel what they’re feeling without apology. I hope they remember that language can be a balm, a weapon, a mirror, a prayer—and sometimes all at once.

I hope someone picks up this book on a day when the world has gone quiet around them, and they find themselves less alone.

And I hope, in some small way, it helps.

Samiya Bashir is a prolific poet, artist, writer, performer, educator, and advocate. She is the author of three poetry collections, including Field Theories (Nightboat, 2017)—winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Awards Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry—Gospel (Redbone Press, 2009), and Where the Apple Falls (Redbone Press, 2005). Formerly an associate professor at Reed College, she currently serves as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. She lives in Harlem.

You can order I Hope This Helps here! ✨