Samina Najmi joins the Author Spotlight to discuss her memoir
Author Name: Samina Najmi
Book Title: Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time
Book Genre: memoir-in-essays
Release Date: October 1, 2025
Publisher: Trio House Press
Welcome Samina! Please tell us a bit about your book.
Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time is a transnational memoir-in-essays, written over the course of ten years and spanning continents and generations. Publishers Weekly notes the themes of motherhood, divorce, and grief, but I also write about the postcolonial realities of war and displacement as my family has experienced them, and about finding home on the page—all anchored in my professoring life in Fresno, California.
What was the spark? What drew you to write a book of essays? What inspired you to tell your story in this way?
As a scholar of war narratives, I was asked to submit something for the Asian American Literary Review’s special issue marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was writing the first of many personal essays that integrated the political with memoir. Over time, many of these essays were published in literary journals, until I sought to shape them into a coherent but non-linear collection. The genre of the personal essay appeals to my sense of time as circular. Ideas appear and reappear in the book as people do, from a slightly different angle each time.
What was your research process like for Sing Me a Circle?
I love research! I’ll have a hunch about something, a curiosity, and I start sleuthing and eventually arrive at some startling realization. This is true whether I’m researching a writer-foremother or the Partition of 1947 or the Lyons factory in London. The personal connections I arrive at through my research are often surprising and sometimes require an adjustment of perspective. For me, research in personal writing serves another purpose: it gives my heart a break.
From your perspective, what’s the hardest thing about writing and researching? And what do you love most about it?
When I first started writing personal essays, in 2011, I’d be wiped out in the process. I’ve learned to manage that sort of emotional and physical toll. Now the hardest thing about writing and researching is—you guessed it—making the time. What I love most about writing personal essays is that I create meaning out of the randomness of the days, and hopefully some beauty.
Any new writing (or other) projects in the works?
Since my book just came into the world, I haven’t had much imagination for anything but this miracle of birth! But yes, I’ve been working on another collection of essays, which picks up from where Sing Me a Circle leaves off. A couple of these have been published recently: “Fire Song” in The Los Angeles Review and “The Heft of the Hollowing” in Hunger Mountain. You’ll see some themes emerging 🙂
Where can readers find you?
Instagram: samina.najmi
Facebook: Samina Najmi
LinkedIn: Samina Najmi
Bluesky: snajmi@bsky.social
Upcoming events:
10/18, Fresno: LitHop25 https://www.lithopfresno.org/
11/8, Sacramento: In Conversation with Doug Rice, Beers Books
11/18, San Diego: In Conversation with Kazim Ali, The Book Catapult
Thank you, Samina! Sing Me a Circle is out NOW.
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.
Author Bio: