New episode of The Emergence Room featuring Samiya Bashir. Poet, multimedia artist, educator, trailblazer, and the first Black woman to receive the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature at the American Academy in Rome.
We talked about poetry as a living architecture. About queer women navigating institutions while becoming “the first” in rooms not originally built for them. About leadership, visibility, survival, and the strange emotional terrain of trailblazing while still trying to remain human inside it all.
Samiya reflected on receiving the Rome Prize just before the pandemic disrupted the world, and the difficult moment when the Academy made the painful decision to send fellows home during COVID. We discussed what it meant to return later as a Visiting Fellow, not simply as a continuation, but as a kind of healing. A re-entry. A chance to resolve unfinished conversations with Rome, with memory, and with the self that had been interrupted mid-dream.
There was a connective tissue throughout the conversation around diaspora, embodiment, poetry, mentorship, and what it means to create while also being created by the worlds we move through. Her Rome Prize project, MAPS :: a cartography in progress, explored movement, family history, and multimedia poetry across cultural geographies.
This episode feels like sitting inside a poem while the city hums outside the window.