Born to Pakistani-American immigrant artists, Jai Hamid Bashir was raised in the American West. She is the daughter of loomsmith, rug designer and master weaver, Hamid Bashir. 

 

With years of academic training and a commitment to lifelong autodidactic learning, Jai studies various forms of mysticism and theology, climate justice, decolonization, and subaltern literature, birth and death rites, gender and sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, animal studies, human and more-than-human systems, plant medicine, classical antiquity, land art, and other forms of inquiry and being.  

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Jai holds an Honors Bachelor of Science in Environmental Studies, a Bachelor of Arts in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. In addition, she is a proud graduate of the Environmental Humanities program at the University of Utah.

 

Jai recently graduated from Columbia University in the City of New York, where Jai was awarded the Linda Corrente Memorial Prize. Jai also recently won an Academy of American Poets University Prize, the 2020 winner of the Zócalo Public Prize, and the 2020 Nostrovia! Prize.

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The sum of her insatiable curiosities, and treatment of the sacred as a location, culminate into aesthetic and visual ecologies found in her poetry. Her primary influences range from Jalāl ad-Din Muhammad Rūmī to Cecilia Vicuña to Frank Stanford. 

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Jai has been published extensively. You can view her publications here.

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Thank you for visiting! 

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Love,

JHB

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