Sing Me a Circle
by Samina Najmi
Rights Sold
Description
Author(s)
Samina Najmi
Related Titles
| Publisher | Trio House Press |
| Publication | Oct 01, 2025 |
| Format | Paperback/Softback |
| ISBN | 978-1949487480 |
| Pages | 336 |
| Age | 18 - 99 |
| Price | $24.99 |
Sing Me a Circle
"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.
Reviews, Awards & Endorsements
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.)
Author
Samina Najmi
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.