Samina Najmi
Sing Me a Circle, October 2025
Samina Najmi's essay collection, Sing Me a Circle, won the 2024 Aurora Polaris Prize and will be published by Trio House Press in October of 2025. Najmi is a professor of multiethnic U.S. literature at California State University, Fresno. A Hedgebrook alumna, Samina’s essays have appeared in World Literature Today, Entropy, the Rumpus, and the Massachusetts Review, among others. Her literary address may be found on the website of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. Trained as a scholar, she made her debut in creative nonfiction in 2011 with her essay “Teaching as a Pakistani American Muslim Feminist” in the Asian American Literary Review. An early essay, “Abdul,” won Map Literary’s 2012 nonfiction prize. Daughter of multigenerational migrations, Samina grew up in Pakistan and England and lived in Massachusetts before moving to California with her then-young family.