Bashir and Rock Get Creative with Their Latest Projects

Two creative writing professors talk craft and colleagueship.

On Thursday, April 20, at 4:30 p.m. in Eliot chapel, the Reed College creative writing faculty Samiya Bashir [2012 - ] and Peter Rock [2001 - ] will read from their latest published works, Field Theories and Spells, respectively. The pair talked about their latest projects and their admiration for each other as colleagues.

Field Theories is Samiya Bashir’s third book of poetry, along with Gospel, and Where the Apple Falls. She holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Poet Laureate, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Poetry Awards. She is the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, residencies, prizes, and is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer's festival for LGBT writers of African descent. Visit Samiya Bashir Dot Com for multimedia content about Field Theories.

Peter Rock’s most recent book is Spells, a novel-within-photographs that is a collaboration with five photographers and concerns shadows and bodies, the living and the dead, talking animals and all manner of shape-shifting. He is also the author of the novels Klickitat, The Shelter Cycle, My Abandonment, The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves, and This Is the Place, as well as a story collection, The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Alex Award and others. Visit the Peter Rock Project to learn more about Spells.

Tags: Books, Film, Music, Professors