About Samina Najmi

Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic US literatures at California State University, Fresno. A scholar of race, gender, and war in US literature, she has written critical essays on the writings of Naomi Shihab Nye, Brian Turner, Charles Chesnutt, and other writers. She has coedited three volumes of critical essays and midwifed the reissue of a 1903 novel, The Heart of Hyacinth, by Onoto Watanna, Asian America’s first known novelist. Samina was among twenty-one writers nationwide to contribute an address on the state and future of Asian American literature for the twentieth anniversary of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in 2017. Samina is a founding faculty advisor for the annual Undergraduate Conference on Multiethnic Literatures of the Americas (UCMLA) at Fresno State and helped to establish the Cheng Lok Chua Scholarship for students of multiethnic US literatures.
 

Samina’s personal essay commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11 ushered in a new era of creative nonfiction in her writing. Her personal essays have been published widely, including in World Literature Today. Among the honors she’s proud to claim: Penguin Random House’s site, Signature, lists “Triptych” as an example of the possibilities of the triptych form; Roxane Gay selected “Greenford’s Gift” for publication in The Rumpus and the essay remained on the website of a high school in Greenford, UK, for three years; “Abdul” won Map Literary’s creative nonfiction prize, and  “Trinita” was nominated for a Pushcart by Under the Sun.
 

Daughter of multigenerational displacements, Samina grew up in Pakistan and England, spent eighteen years in Massachusetts, and, since 2006, calls Fresno, California, home. Here she has watched with wonder her two children, her many students, and her citrus grow.
 

Samina believes in Fresno’s sunsets; in everyone’s three feet of influence, and in the power of language and literature to extend our reach beyond it.