About the Poets:

Samiya Bashir is the author of I Hope This Helps (2025) and Field Theories (2017), winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Awards Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Her other books are Gospel (2009), and Where the Apple Falls (2005). Samiya’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature. She lives in Harlem.

t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher and founder of the POWERHOUSE Residency.  She is the author of two poetry collections, how to get over from Red Hen Press and & more black from Augury Books, finalist for the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Claremont Graduate University, finalist for the 2020 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.