Sing Me a Circle

Name: Sing Me a Circle
ISBN: 978-1949487480

by Samina Najmi

Publisher

Trio House Press

Publication

Oct 01, 2025

Format

Paperback/Softback

Illustrated

Price

$24.99

Dimensions

6 x 9 x 0.75 in

ISBN

978-1949487480

ASIN

1949487482

Pages

336

Age

Adult 18+

Rights Sold

🌍 World Wide Rights Available

Description

"All points on a circle are always the same distance from the center." These exquisite personal essays trace the orbit of author Samina Najmi as she reflects on events, people, and places that shape her vision of the world. Whether she finds herself in Pakistan, England, or the United States, she keeps her family and her love of stories firmly at the center of her life. As Najmi navigates the process of forging her identity as a professor and mother, her extended family inspires, haunts, and stirs her to action. Through sorrows and singing, questions and growth, she passes along a centering love of family and beauty to her children. And like the unsung writers in her family, Najmi seeks home in time and on the page.

Awards & Endorsements

Starred Review in Publisher's Weekly

Najmi, a literature professor at California State University, Fresno, explores in this visceral and captivating essay collection her memories of growing up in Pakistan and England and eventually moving to the U.S. to study literature. Remarking on the cyclical nature of time (“All linearity is circularity in disguise”), she chronicles how, like her parents, she too left home and became an educator. She describes memoir writing as a sort of family inheritance; her grandmother and father both penned their family histories so future generations would know where they came from. Powerful stories abound: Najmi tells of a beloved cousin, the first girl in the family to win a scholarship to an American college, who died by suicide three months before leaving home; of a domestic worker, Abdul, who lived with her family and became family; and of her experience teaching American students as a Muslim professor after 9/11. Along the way, Najmi offers incisive reflections on motherhood, grief, and divorce: “The mind conspires to not see. It’s only now as my fingertip retraces the thread of time and fumbles its way back to the spool that I detect the silent, stealthy unraveling.” The result is a gut-wrenching and joyous meditation on the passage of time. (Oct.)

Featured in Poets and Writers Magazine - Top Five Fall Nonfiction Releases

Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time (Trio House Press, October) by Samina Najmi, an intergenerational and sweeping collection of personal essays that orbits around a Pakistani American professor and mother as she writes into and through time, centering her family, their stories, and the places that have informed her identity and her exploration of home. Agent: None. Editors: Kris Bigalk and Cynthia Via

Author(s)

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.